60% OF POLISH HOSPITALS to be "commercialised"
I recently had an interesting conversation with Marcin Ajewski, who runs Polish Healthcare Consultants, in Warsaw, and who forecasts huge changes fast and early for the Polish hospital sector.
The Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, has blocked attempts to enable privatisation of the hugely indebted public hospital sector. Because of this, premier Donald Tusk is simply making changes in Ministry rules, thus avoiding the need to get the measures passed as Parliamentary legislation.
Ajewski expects that by February or March the measures will have been passed. Essentially, this will allow all hospitals, bar the elite owned by universities and ministries, to be either "commercialised" or "privatised".
He says commercialisation is probably the route forward, with the local authority setting up the hospital as a limited company, appointing a board of directors and possibly selling a minority to a private operator.
That way, any debt inside the hospital can be cleared from the municipality's or voivod's books. Wholesale privatisation, where a private company takes a majority stake, is much more controversial, but already possible for municipal hospitals.
Commercialisation has many advantages over the existing arrangement, where public hospitals can run up as much debt as they like and are run by a single director. This person is often a political appointee, and Ajewski says such directors are typically paralysed by the responsibility placed on their shoulders.
He expects no fewer than 60% of Polish hospitals to go the commercialisation route, often, but not always, working with a private company.
Note that the new rules will also cover the big regional voivod hospitals for the first time.
Other hospitals will, of course, be privatised completely (see our separate news article with Piotr Gerber).
I finished the interview by asking Ajewski where he would invest money in private healthcare in Poland. He answered: "Consolidation. The Polish healthcare market is worth €18.5bn, and the largest private sector player, Luxmed, has sales of less than €100m, or less than half a percent, and the fifth largest player is ten times smaller."
Compelling numbers indeed!
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