TIRANA, Dec. 5 – Eight physicians serving at Tirana’s main hospital emergency room signed a letter Tuesday addressed to the hospital administration and the state’s highest officials in which they threaten to quit unless conditions are improved for them and their patients.
The memo was addressed to Minister of Healthcare and Social Protection Ogerta Manastirliu and to the country’s Prime Minister and President. It expressed the medical professionals’ dissatisfaction with the hospital’s working conditions, including a reduced medical staff to deal with increasing patient numbers while resources and space has also dwindled.
The doctors also complained about the inability of other state services to do their job properly, thus, bringing overcrowding to a part of the hospital that should be the last line of defense.
“There are no proper working conditions for the medical staff and there is an overflow patients being treated. Other wards lack capacity and other services don’t comply with the rules,” the memo said, among other complaints, which included lack of medication and no beds or space left in the emergency room.
The government was quick to issue a statement saying the doctors had not resigned as implied in the letter and that it would address the issue.
This is not the first time the issue of resigning doctors comes up. With many complaints concerning the malfunctioning of a series of hospital service chains and the health system itself, many public medical doctors have chosen to resign for a better jobs in the private sector, or for careers abroad in countries like Germany.
Albania already has the lowest per capita number of medical doctors in the region, and with an aging population boom coming up, the country is heading for a major healthcare crisis, experts warn.
Lack of proper healthcare, together with the low quality of the education system, is the primary reason why Albanians migrate away from their native land, surveys show.
As recently as August, more than half of the country’s hospital directors resigned following a request by Prime Minister Edi Rama over alleged mismanagement in the country’s public health system.
Saying that the hospitals’ mismanagement adds to the people’s negative perception of doctors and medical personnel, Rama also warned that doctors themselves shared part of the guilt for this unfavorable perception.
