Wages for nurses, doctors, and other hospital staff was among a wide range of issues explored during a meeting with citizens and youth representatives in the city of Korça, with Prime Minister Edi Rama vowing to open a new chapter in the country’s health system. “If we wish to build a health system where doctors and nurses feel equally motivated like their colleagues at private hospitals, we should walk away from a unified wage system across the health system and adopt a performance-based payment method.”

The Premier noted that “a surgeon who performs 10 surgical procedures should not be paid equally to another doctor who performs just one surgical procedure. A doctor who should not receive same payment compared to another physician who leaves at the standard working schedule. Different payments should also be based on a set of other criteria. We should all be clear about the system change. We have chosen a system that cannot exclude, but should integrate and make use of the capacities of the private sector. It should always clear that the interest of the private sector is the private interest, the public sector is interested in the public but the partnership between the two would harmonize their interests.”

The meeting also touched upon the  abusive case involving a cleaning worker at the Shefqet Ndroqi University Hospital in Tirana, with the government head Rama saying: “If we want the ‘Tire’ phenomenon – which doesn’t represent the community of doctors and nurses, but it represents a malady in the health system – then it would be useless to discuss and deny that it is a malady that can’t be treated just by waiting for the people to report such incidents, or by sending that woman to prison and warning others that they would up behind bars, but by creating motivation within the health system.”