On the eve of the year-end holidays, Prime Minister Edi Rama hosted a special ceremony in honour of doctors, nurses and health care professionals from hospitals all over the country, expressing them profound gratitude and respect for successful work during the outgoing year, as well as for the significantly improved health care delivery also thanks to the government major investments in the country’s health system.
During the event, PM Rama awarded certificates of appreciation to the distinguished heads of various specific hospital wards, and the Big Cordon with a Star for Public Acknowledgement to the renowned Professor Besim Elezi.
“I would like to tell you that it is with great emotions and with pleasure that thanks to the office I hold I have the privilege to award the Big Cordon with a Star for Public Acknowledgment to the star of the Albanian surgery, Professor Besim Elezi,” PM Rama said.
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Good evening everyone and first of all I would like to assure each and every one of you that I will deliver a shorter speech than usual, because it turns out to be not an easily successful attempt.
Of course, it could take a lot of words to say during this occasion, but I won’t go over details and over everything we have already done and we are doing, things that have to do with all the aspects of the infrastructure of our health system. Instead, I would like to focus and place attention on you, on the people and professionals working in the health system, namely doctors, nurses and all medical workers across the system, to express each and every one of them the most heartfelt appreciation and respect, as I have been granted the opportunity to see firsthand your working conditions that have kept constantly improving, but which however have been far from being decent ones for a very long time, whereas the workload and burden you all had to share, also because of impossibility to rationally distribute and share it throughout the territory exactly because of the lacking conditions over the years, and your commitment that peaked during the Covid-19 pandemic, although this is really part of the daily lives of health care professionals, and I would like to again express my and our entire solidarity also regarding that very shadow haunting during lifetime and your daily professional activity, the shadow of ugly prejudice, alleging that doctors and nurses in this country take first a look at your pockets, before providing care to patients. This is the most brutal and vulgar and expression, generally and mostly used by those who fortunately don’t and may they never need your care, but they take pleasure at alleging about it, because it is a pleasure we Albanians usually are pleased to share with one another and speculate about people and especially about people who for various reasons are in the limelight.
Of course, there could be sporadic cases featuring indecent individuals among the health care professionals, however they are not the rule, but minor exceptions that reinforce the rule within our health system, first and foremost, that you are to be credited for the whole volume of lifesaving or disease treatment missions.
It is the merit of all doctors and nurses, it is the merit of the whole team of health professionals who are available and work around the clock to provide best care to people who need their support.
We have made all efforts to demonstrate our respect and solidarity by improving quality and work conditions that – as far as I have at least noticed and experienced firsthand – have significantly improved compared to a few years ago, as hospitals across the country have been already equipped with state-of-the-art equipment and medical devices, and on the other hand we have tried to increase the reward and remuneration for the health care workers.
We know that although wages in the health system have been increased by 70% since we took office, it still insufficient and new pay hikes will be enforced soon and we should definitely deliver on our target within this term in office to increase your wages by 100% compared to the wages in 2013 and I would like to assure you that this is our top priority, as you definitely deserve a lot more.
I am very pleased to highlight the fact today that despite the hardship and challenges of this time and in spite of a trend among doctors to leave the country, as it is currently the case with health professionals in many other Southern European countries, we have been able to hire around 5000 nurses in our health system.
What matters most is the fact that these 5000 nurses now work in completely improved conditions to ensure competition and merit that is now indisputable. Over 900 of them were employed this year alone, along with 1320 doctors who joined the system this year and 35 of them this year alone. This year has been important also in terms of introducing more quotas for medicine and nursery students during this academic year, given that we have all the academic capacities and the need for young doctors and health professionals is very high.
As many as 100 specialist physicians have been recruited to deliver care at regional hospitals and this is another very positive indicator. The University of Medicine is really a source of inspiration and pride, a source of courage and optimism for the future, not merely for the fact that in the face of huge influx of applications, but also for the fact that it approves quality of teaching, it certifies and accredits in a way like no other university does through the young and newly-graduated professionals who are really welcomed in the European market and in Germany in particular, exactly because they gain skills and knowhow that are most sought in the European market.
I have had talks with the German authorities on this issue, on the fact that the Albanian state spends and significantly invests in education of the young would-be doctors and they are then recruited by the German state for free. And of course there is not much we can do, because it is the freedom of movement, the freedom of choice and the freedom the market itself, yet we are making efforts to somehow be rewarded for this precious contribution we are in a way providing to the German health system and what I would like to highlight here is that my interlocutors have openly admitted that the doctors coming from Albania are indeed a very surprising example for the fact that they posses distinguished skills and capacities compared to their peers coming from the EU Member States and this makes us think they don’t actually know Albania quite well and its capacities since Albania is home to a medicine university that produces such skilled doctors and, of course, this is an evaluation of the academic capacity of this whole team, because in the end of the day a good part of you here are the ones serving and transferring the knowhow and expertise to the younger professionals.
I would like to conclude without pointing out the long list of the accomplishments and the things we have done, because it is not the case for this today. However, I would like to say that I am looking forward to seeing the hospital autonomy expanding across the territory, because this is an early and long-standing goal, but time is now high, because you know quite well, because it is so easy to say it, but pretty complex to deliver on the hospital authority and the good news is that regional university hospitals and hospitals centres have been already accredited by gaining maximum required credits to set standards for accrediting.
There are 261 entities and this forms a great basis to go on with the hospital autonomy, which will rightly do what many of you expect, namely the opportunity for a non-uniform assessment of doctors, but instead a merit-based and performance-based system is built in terms of remuneration, which means that physicians would receive higher bonuses based on their performance. In other words, the surgeons performing a higher number of surgical interventions, doctors who perform more medical check-ups, and therefore they should receive higher wages.
To conclude, I said that the University of Medicine is our top priority and after the investments we have made also in building the campus, we are now ready for the bio-simulation centre, which would represent a significant leap in terms of the lab and technological capacities of the University of Medicine, which marked its 70th anniversary, while the Tirana University celebrated its 65th anniversary just two days ago. However, they said that Tirana University is the first one in Albania and that the University of Medicine is not 70 years old.
Of course this is also for the fact that before being included under the umbrella of Tirana University, this was an institute. However, I very much like this contradiction as it unintentionally shows that the University of Medicine is a step ahead and should be ahead of every other higher education institution, because if we are not ready in terms of health, then every other university should be closed.
Together with the Health Minister, I would like to symbolically express gratitude to some of the most prominent health professionals in the country.
