Increasing life expectancy will lead to significant increase in number of people receiving medical services - health minister

RIGA - A vision for access to healthcare services needs to be developed for the next five years, as the number of people receiving medical services will grow significantly with the increase in life expectancy, Health Minister Hosams Abu Meri (New Unity) said on Friday at a conference "Future Health Economy: efficiency and sustainability" organized by the Saeima Social and Labor Affairs Committee and Riga Stradins University.

In his view, the most important thing is to focus on the Latvian people, i.e. on what kind of healthcare costs and services can be provided now and in five years' time, and how quickly and qualitatively.

We should work on the efficiency of the hospital network and centralize very expensive and high-quality hospital services so that they can be received not only in the leading hospitals in Riga, but also in the regions.

At the same time, the Minister said that on average at least an additional EUR 400-500 million would be needed to reach the level of healthcare in other countries, such as Estonia.

Human resources are essential to achieve this goal - the provision of medical staff, including healthy staff, because "at present, colleagues work so much that they often become patients themselves", he said. The Speaker of the Saeima, Daiga Mierina (Greens/Farmers), also stressed that one of the main obstacles to access to healthcare is the lack of specialists.

Although Mierina assessed the overall dynamics of healthcare as positive, many health needs of society remain unmet.

"The question is, do we want to move towards private healthcare? Probably not. Ensuring access to healthcare and improving certain areas is a joint effort of all," Mierina argued.

In her view, more focus should be put on areas of healthcare such as preventive medicine, early diagnosis and adequate rehabilitation. Mierina said that a healthy lifestyle also means cooperation with local authorities, who should be the ones to look for efficient use of resources.

"The strategic scope of healthcare needs to be broadened, not only medically, but also from the perspective of economics, healthcare, local government, healthy living and education," she said.

In Abu Meri's view, Latvia is not in a bad situation in terms of innovative healthcare ideas. There are many people developing digitalization pilot projects in the country, which have been welcomed internationally. At the same time, there is no shortage of people working with AI resources and innovations.

It is the digitization of medicine that will allow us to monitor the availability and quality of services more effectively, by understanding what services are most needed, including what service provision needs to be improved, the Minister stressed. Mierina also agreed and stressed that "you can also make money from medicine" - so far, several international partners have visited Latvian hospitals, assessing and learning from the country's best specialists. Therefore, it is important to continue introducing new technologies - "medicine should be "in tune" with science, innovation and education," she argued.

In parallel, the Health Minister noted that too little is said about the overall good healthcare system in Latvia - more often the negative things are talked about.

"We focus on the shortage of medicines and we are worried that we cannot include certain medicines in the list of individual medicines in time. But we have to remember that we have good medicine because, thanks to the level of services, patients in Latvia receive quality healthcare," says Abu Meri.