Providing local hospitals with much-needed drugs and starting new infrastructure investments are the new health minister Vlad Voiculescu’s priorities for his term.

Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos named Voiculescu, a man that comes from outside the public healthcare system, to take over as minister after the former one resigned following the diluted disinfectant scandal. The new health minister has only six months to try and make a difference in the Romanian public healthcare system.

The minister wants to make sure that “essential medicines”, drugs that have existed on the market in the last decades which are both cheap and effective, will be available in public hospitals within the next weeks. “I am certainly not the first minister that faces the lack of cheap drugs in hospitals, but I surely want to be the last,” Voiculescu said, according to local News.ro.

Infrastructure investments are his second priority as one of the big causes for hospital infections is the old infrastructure, which endangers the patients’ lives. Voiculescu plans to speed up the projects of the three regional hospitals in Cluj-Napoca, Iasi, and Craiova, which are financed with EUR 150 million from the European Union. He will also try to unblock a EUR 250 million program with the World Bank, which includes EUR 180 million worth of loans for investments. No money from this program has been spent so far, the Minister said.

Voiculescu wants to invest in the Marie Curie and C.C. Iliescu hospitals, which are operated in public-private partnership.

He also said that he would make several changes so that hospital managers are encouraged to report nosocomial infections without being sanctioned.

editor@romania-insider.com