Japan will finance the purchase of medical equipment for hospitals in the Mykolaiv region

Hospital, Mykolaiv region, photo by NikVesti

Hospitals of the Mykolaiv region will receive medical equipment, the purchase of which will be financed by the Japanese government.

It will arrive at the hospital already in January 2024, the Ministry of Health of Ukraine reported.

A total of 25 hospitals in the Mykolaiv, Kyiv, Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk, Kirovohrad and Cherkasy regions will receive the equipment. This is equipment of various forms of purpose, including: portable ultrasound machines, defibrillators, syringe pumps, patient monitors, generators, etc. A total of 14 million hryvnias worth of equipment was purchased.

It is still unknown which hospitals in the Mykolaiv region will receive the equipment, Maksym Beznosenko, the head of the health care department of the Mykolaiv Oblast, clarified to NikVesti. This will be clear only after the corresponding order of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine.

Procurement and logistics are carried out by the patient organization BO «100% Life» within the framework of the memorandum with the Japanese side, the ministry clarified.

Inadequate condition of hospitals

We will remind that after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy criticized the condition of the wards in the Mykolaiv Regional Children's Hospital, they started repairing the surgical department and installed air conditioners in eight wards.

After this incident, the head of Mykolayiv RMA Vitalii Kim drew attention to the low speed of work of the temporary commission of the regional council on the inspection of medical facilities. He also called on residents of Mykolaiv to send complaints and suggestions regarding changes in the medical system to e-mail, so that these appeals will be considered by the relevant group. After anonymous complaints, Vitalii Kim announced the dismissal of the chief doctors of the medical facilities if he became convinced of their incompetence.

Corruption in hospitals

For the second time, the head of RMA changed this situation a month later and once again announced personnel changes. The reason for this was a different situation in the medical field of the region: the law enforcement officers exposed a large-scale scheme of making money on evasions in the Mykolaiv regional mental hospital.

After that, the court ordered a preventive measure against the policeman who was responsible for searching for evaders. However, the suspicion and the selection of a preventive measure have not yet been served on the doctors who participated in the scheme of illegal earnings, in particular on the chief doctor Viktor Taran.

Reacting to this situation, the head of the Mykolayiv RMA for the medical field, Yurii Hranaturov, said that the exposed scheme in the regional mental health center is an isolated case in the medical field of the region. He believes that the RMA health care department is not responsible for the activities of the chief physician.

At the same time, Yurii Hranaturov announced that the SBI will conduct an additional check in the regional mental health center to find out whether other doctors are involved in the corrupt scheme of making money on evasion.

Later it became known that the acting director of the Mykolaiv Regional Center for Mental Health, Viktor Taran, who, according to the SBI, organized the scheme for the production of certificates for evaders, will remain in his post.

Reduction of doctors

However, these two cases are not the only ones in the medical field of Mykolaiv Oblast. As early as March 31, 2023, the editorial office of NikVesti received and published a copy of the order of the chief doctor of the emergency medical hospital, Oleksandr Demyiianov, on the reduction of the number of employees. According to him, this decision is due to underfunding: this year the hospital received only 91 million hryvnias from the National Health Service, while last year it received 128 million hryvnias.

In response to this publication, officials began to declare en masse that this decision will not affect working doctors, as it only applies to vacancies. At the same time, the health care department assured that the reduction will not affect the quality of service, and the military governor explained this by reforms in medicine.

However, NikVesti conducted its own investigation and found out that such assurances turned out to be false. It turned out that the hospital staff faced a choice: reduce the number of doctors or reduce wages. Thus, the medical staff of the hospital, which treated severely wounded people around the clock in the first months of the war, had to agree to a 25% cut in wages. This reduction creates a number of problems, in particular, 6 neurosurgeons out of 12 are left to work in neurosurgery. At the same time, not all of them have the right to operate independently.

However, in April it became known that the orders for the transfer of surgeons to 0.75 rates were canceled in the Mykolaiv Emergency Hospital.