Romania’s Government adopted on Wednesday an emergency ordinance that changes the rules for hiring hospital managers opening these positions to more potential candidates. The ordinance also sets some restrictions for the job, providing that hospital managers can’t hold leadership positions in political parties or private companies.

Up until now, only university teachers and doctors were allowed to run for management positions in local hospitals. The Government ordinance offers the possibility that all those who have the required management expertise to run hospital units be allowed to compete for hospital manager positions.

“The cases in which a person is a very good surgeon, a very good teacher, a very good researcher, and a very good manager, and manages to do everything all at the same time, aren’t as frequent as we thought. This is why, if there’s a very good manager in a community, who is interested in managing a hospital, the competition for the management of that community’s hospital will be open to him or her,” health minister Vlad Voiculescu said on Wednesday.

He added that many foreign hospital managers wouldn’t be able to compete for running a hospital in Romania, under the current law, because they are neither doctors nor professors. “In the UK, for example, 70% of the hospital managers are not doctors, in Italy, over 50% are not doctors. In Romania, this restriction, corroborated with other measures, is only intended to keep and consolidate the influence of some groups over local hospitals,” Voiculescu explained.

He added that the new ordinance also removes politics from local hospital management. “Hospital managers will not be allowed, starting today, to hold leadership, management, or control position in any political party. We don’t want hospitals run by political interests. We’ve had that in many cases, in the past 25 years, all around the country and, as we all know, the political leaders generally go abroad for treatment, even for less complex disease,” the health minister said.

The ordinance brings several other changes. Thus, not only the general manager but also the medical director and the financial director will be selected through contest. The competition for hospital managers will not focus on “mechanically” learning the legislation, but on hospital management projects that will be made public so that the doctors and medical personnel working in those hospitals, the patient associations, and community members can take part in the selection process and see what is the best project for each hospital.

The Health Ministry will also set a minimum period of time which hospital managers will have to dedicate to running the hospital, in case they also have other jobs. “There are cases in which the workday of a hospital manager reaches 48 hours as he is, at the same time, hospital manager, surgeon, professor, researcher, and, maybe, doctor in a private clinic. This obviously has a negative impact on the quality of the medical services provided to the hospital’s patients,” Voiculescu said.

The Government also wants to combat nepotism in local hospitals by not allowing hospital managers to hire their relatives as managers or department heads.

The health minister said the changes were thought as solutions to the problems identified in local public hospitals following the ministry’s controls. Voiculescu said on several occasions that, if all rules were applied, 80% of all local hospitals should be closed.

editor@romania-insider.com