More than 25,000 doctors left the Romanian healthcare system in the last ten years, and increasing the salaries in this sector was not the best solution for bringing them back, health minister Victor Costache said on Tuesday, December 17.

Costache believes that better working conditions would make the doctors want to return to Romania.

“About 25,000 doctors with varying degrees of training have left Romania in the last ten years and, as you can clearly see, the simple increase of salaries was not the solution to bring our doctors back, and so we have to work, first and foremost, on working conditions in hospitals. We need to raise our infrastructure to a European level, especially for our patients,” the minister said at local news station Digi24, local Agerpres reported.

He also said that the Health Ministry has short, medium and long term projects to improve the conditions in hospitals. “A long term project is that of the regional hospitals that we support and that we keep in a straight line, but you know very well that I was among the first to say how things really are, I said that these hospitals will be built, if all the deadlines are met, in 2026 – 2027 […] In the short and medium term, we have identified EUR 170 million that have to be spent by June,” Victor Costache explained.

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