In an interview with the magazine Mladina, the Minister of Health boasted about the reduction of waiting times in healthcare. However, her statement was quickly met with rebuttals from doctors. The fact that the number of people waiting longer than the maximum acceptable waiting time has increased significantly has also been confirmed by data from the National Institute of Public Health (NIJZ).
“None of us expected that we would be able to reduce the number of people waiting in such a short period of time,” reads the headline of the interview. Dr Igor Muževič, head of the Praktik.um family medicine doctors’ union, sarcastically responded to this, as he remarked that the current authorities had “managed” to do it in a single week.
“And this in a single week in September and with unchanged waiting times,” he added under the minister’s statement.
He even backed up his claim with a graph showing the supposed change in waiting times.
In light of the above, it is important to note that in the middle of last year, the government did manage to “reduce” the number of patients waiting longer than the maximum acceptable waiting times – but only on paper. As the aforementioned graphs show, the actual number did not change, only the acceptable waiting time was changed. For example, for referrals with the urgency level “very fast”, the acceptable waiting time has been increased from 14 days to 30 days, creating the illusion of shorter waiting lists.
According to data obtained by the national media outlet, RTV, despite these bureaucratic manoeuvres, the number of people with unacceptable waiting times has increased further between the 1st of January 2024 and the 1st of January 2025. On the 1st of January 2024, the number of patients with unacceptably long waiting times was 65,841, and on the 1st of January this year, it was already 78,776. This is a significant increase.
S. K.
