The new Paediatric Hospital opened its doors at the University Hospital Centre on Thursday to provide care to children from all over Albania. The state-of-the-art and child and environment-friendly facility in accordance with the highest European standards is expected to deliver quality health care to over 129,000 paediatric patients annually.
The new hospital facility houses three core paediatric care services, namely the paediatric emergency care with a 30-bed capacity, a 28-bed intensive care unit, as well as the paediatric surgery service with four operating theatres and 10 pre and post-operative beds.
The new Paediatric Hospital premises provide for optimum conditions for care services, as well as optimum work conditions for the health personnel.
Prime Minister Edi Rama toured the premises of the newly-reconstructed children’s hospital at the Mother Teresa University Hospital Centre.
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Hello everyone!
I recall or I just recalled that several years ago, when I used to serve as Tirana Mayor, the Municipality of Tirana conducted a survey with best performing university students, asking them on the municipal activities in a bid to figure out what hampered them to take up jobs in the municipality or in other public sector in general.
Back then, the university students, being the best performing ones, were certainly highly-sought by the private sector to hire them and they themselves preferred the private sector instead of government jobs. The findings of the survey were really surprising and they somehow continuously guided me towards understanding the transformation process of the human resources within the public sector itself.
To our surprise, the two main barriers named by the students had nothing to do with the low salary, which used to be much lower back then, but they had to do with completely different reasons.
Students primarily cited the lack of conditions to work in the public sector and opportunity to demonstrate their potential as professionals, feeling as part of a space that offers favourable conditions. In short, they cited the lack of proper physical conditions of the public institutions and, second, total lack of confidence in a possible merit-based evaluation system.
I was actually reminded of this fact today as I was listening to the Health Minister’s remarks, as well as taking into account the whole effort and the steps that have been already made to continuously improve the conditions at the country’s largest and most important hospital centre.
Of course, creating proper conditions to provide doctors and nurses the opportunity to feel in an optimum space, where they can practice their profession, is definitely a strong motive to serve devotedly. Those who seek to say something at any cost, although there is nothing to be said, keep reiterating that “it is not the buildings or the facades, but people who make the difference.” Of course, people are key to making the difference, yet it is impossible to imagine people can do their best if the conditions at their workplace are unfavourable and no matter how much people sacrifice, as it has been the case throughout the history of healthcare system, which has survived thanks to the sacrifice of the leading physicians, it is impossible for anyone to try and do the maximum.
On the other hand, I strongly believe that the physical state of any infrastructure has a pivotal role not only in the performance of those working within these spaces, but also in the relationship among people themselves, namely in the patient-doctor relationship in this case, which has sometimes been extremely tense and strained in the past and, according to my humble view, in addition to everything else, the work conditions actually caused such relationship to be specially strained. The cause was the work conditions for the health personnel and the patients and their families served by the personnel. What used to happen here was unimaginable and today we have absolutely entered a completely different phase, yet we should definitely move beyond the buildings and physical and work conditions, not only by strengthening the personnel, but also by creating a new space of interaction between the hospitals’ personnel and the state itself.
We have reiterated it more than once and it is now the phase when we are embarking on the implementation process of the most important and most critical part of the reform designed to transform the country’s health system, namely the hospital autonomy reform to allow medical teams and all medical workers to be entitled to wages and remuneration according to their merit and work performance, with the merit at the highlight of the system’s altered operation. This means that the hard working professionals who deliver care to a large number of patients, not on a subjective basis but on an objective basis, who perform the most surgical interventions, the highest number of medical check-ups according to the whole set of performance criteria in a health system with autonomy, of course they will be paid more.
The whole process of handling the income earmarked to hospitals should go through precisely this nascent management and operational structure, which grants decision-making power to health personnel over many aspects beyond their salary, namely the supplies, the way it is an hospital is organized internally, all interactions and definitely also the investments, which make the health personnel to take over the process instead of waiting for the government and the Health Ministry to do everything for them. The government and the Health Ministry will simply support and guarantee the health system.
It is very important that we provide doctors, nurses and all medical workers the opportunity to receive much higher salaries, not only through the government decision to increase the minimum wage, but also by providing the system with the opportunity to make differentiations. To put it clearly, this means, that the base salary is not further lowered, while those who give more to the system because of their capability and performance they are rewarded and paid higher, and this is automatically done by the performance evaluation system itself and the opinion expressed by patients, their family members and the public opinion as a whole. So, it is a whole performance-based scoring system that would allow doctors receive higher payment compared to another colleague, who keeps receiving the net salary and who fails to earn more because of a medium performance level.
Such an approach would certainly rationalize financial resources, because once doctors become part of this structure along with chiefs and managers who determine the hospital needs, the medicine supplies the hospital needs, their quantities, and the protocols, then the expenditures are rationalized at maximum. A very considerable rationalization has been made, if we are to consider the fact that several years ago stocks of medicines were created as they were not used until they all expired and we faced dramatic shortages of medicines that were needed and all this was related to orders that were made clientelistic way to the distributors affiliated with the Ministry of Health, influential officials, bribe or whatever, and therefore the supplies were totally out of control and therefore the state budget money allocated to the health system was actually spent inefficiently.
To cut it short, as the Health Minister actually exhausted this subject, and work continues here. I am very glad that everything took place and completed within our projections and we are now used to refrain from making optimistic predictions, as all of a sudden an earthquake or a natural disaster could hit, or another pandemic, floods or God knows what can happen. Therefore, according to all realistic projections, we expect to complete any project designed to transform the University Hospital Centre into one of the largest hospital complexes in the region and not only in Albania.
One of the professors here, while we were walking down here, said: “We haven’t seen such a facility in none of the countries we have visited.” And this is actually for a good reason. This is the opportunity you are given when lagging behind others, because other countries have already solved all these issues long times ago and, of course, except for the cases when they build them brand new from the scratch, in most of the cases they limit to what they have already built in the past and when things are done from scratch, like it is the case here, you can of course can do even better. So, a series of projects are being implemented here, as you have seen it for yourself. No comparison can be drawn with the previous paediatric hospital. Once the next phase completes, the entire children’s hospital, hopefully within a reasonable deadline, will meet these standards. In the meantime, the reconstruction projects on the infectious diseases hospital, the Cardiology and Heart Surgery Hospital and the Internal Diseases Hospital, which is about to complete, and Plastic Burns and so on and so forth, the university hospital complex will be perfect.
Of course the challenge is that in parallel with the perfection in infrastructure, not to achieve perfection, but to improve exactly the service capacity, to increase transparency, to maximize the value of merit, provide leading and best performing doctors thanks to their professional skills the opportunity to be paid optimally and definitely in parallel to increase the minimum wage.
The government will increase the salaries of medical workers this year and it will do so each year. Our ambition is to make sure that the doctors’ and nurses’ monthly wages increase by 40% within this term in office, always hoping that the country will be spared of other natural disasters. We hope God will presumably accept this prayer and will allow us to deliver on what we plan in the next four years.
t is a fantastic coincidence that this year which we want to dedicate to children horizontally in all sectors, begins exactly with opening of the children’s hospital and I hope it will be an ominous symbolism and in the meantime I am very happy that we managed even today to think a little more than once, to think twice and thrice about the aesthetic aspect, having no more those “Micky Mouse” painting images that seem as if coming out of the nightmares of children images distorted by the hands of amateurs who to stain the walls, but really a well-thought job in this aspect, in terms of decor and a new government program is also this one to stimulate more the presence of urban art, decorative art in the public space and in the space of institutions. So, in this aspect, too, the University Hospital Centre will change, as it is home to very favorable public spaces to become really comforting premises with lights, atmosphere, conditions and service help people to feel comfortable and relaxed.
Thank you!
