PM Orban: Romania will benefit from four billion euro European funds for investments in healthcare

Romania will benefit from European funds worth over 4 billion euro, which will be destined for investments in healthcare, said, on Saturday, Prime Minister Ludovic Orban.

Present in Arad, at the signing of European funds financing contracts in the realm of healthcare, the head of the Executive said that "investments need to target both the health infrastructure, as well as the equipping not only of hospitals, but the practices of family doctors and the practices of specialist doctors working in ERs."

"We will have funds worth over four billion euro, which will be destined for investments in healthcare. Here, all the institutions, all the structures in the health system need to be prepared to generated projects in order to be able to absorb these European funds, which will be extremely high and will need to be used. Ultimately, our purpose it to improve the quality of medical services that we provide to people, to better take care of people's health, to ensure better conditions for prevention, for diagnosing, for treating citizens and to ensure, obviously, better working conditions for the medical staff, medics, nurses and other categories of employees," Orban stated.

Furthermore, he spoke of the necessity to reinforce the capacity of public health directorates to intervene in medical crises situation.

"It was seen very clearly that, for a long period of time, public health directorates were forgotten and were treated as a 'Cinderella' of the public system, but we saw how important and necessary they are. Here we will have to make massive investments in digitization, massive investments in preparing personnel, in recruiting personnel, because, unfortunately, public health directorates were undersized and missing a staff with the capacity to truly face challenges," Ludovic Orban added.