PM Orban: There will be places without family physician; we have to make this specialty more attractive

Prime Minister Ludovic Orban said in Craiova on Friday that in the coming years, after the retirement of several family physicians, there will be places in Romania without family physicians, and so their medical specialty has to be made more attractive by various measures.

"We need to increase the attractiveness of this specialty of family medicine by improving the conditions in the contracts with the Insurance House, under programmes to equip family medicine practices, by support systems for family physicians in small urban or rural areas where it does not exist. The problem existed in the interwar period in Romania as well but solutions were found. Of course this is a medium-term policy and cannot be implemented immediately, because the reality is that at the moment family medicine is not very attractive to many of the young people who enter the residency or take the exam at the end of their residency," said Orban.

According to the prime minister, as many graduates as possible should be encouraged to take up family medicine, but until a decision was made to finance 1,000 community health nurses from European funds. "We need to increase this attractiveness for family physicians, to give some incentives that will determine as many graduates as possible to go move that direction. This is a programme that has to be applied for a period of 3-6 years. Anyway, we have made the decision to use European funds to fund 1,000 community health nurses, a kind of nurses who support the activity of family physicians, and where there are no family physicians perform certain medical functions as needed," said Orban.