The Slovenian Democratic Party parliamentary group has requested an urgent meeting of the Committee on Health, in order to address the extremely high excess mortality. Slovenia ranks first in the European Union in this metric.
Slovenia is one of the countries with the oldest population in the world. The oldest country is Japan, with an average age of 47.8 years, followed by Germany and Italy. Slovenia ranks fourth with an average age of 44.9 years. That is also why the previous, Janez Janša government, set up the Office for Demography, which was abolished by Robert Golob‘s government almost immediately after the 2022 elections.
The Slovenian Democratic Party (Slovenska demokratska stranka – SDS), as well as the School Student Organisation of Slovenia (Dijaška organizacija Slovenije), also drew attention to the recent tragic event in the capital, as well as to the increasingly serious mental distress among young people, which can lead to tragic ends. In five years, a whole class of children, or 23 minors, have taken their own lives. Suicide attempts are on the rise, with 569 recorded attempts last year.
Eurostat (the statistical office of the European Union) has started measuring excess mortality since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. This statistic represents the number of deaths from all causes measured over a given period, above the number defined in the baseline period. In this case, the baseline was the average number of deaths that occurred each month between 2016 and 2019, a period not affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. The higher the value, the greater the number of additional deaths compared to the baseline, while the negative indicator shows that there were fewer deaths in a given month compared to the baseline period. On the 15th of February 2024, Eurostat published the latest data on excess mortality in the Member States of the European Union for the month of December 2023. At that time, the excess mortality rate in the European Union was 9.5 percent, up from 8.5 percent in November. However, with the latest figures, all alarms should be sounded immediately in Slovenia.
In December 2023, excess mortality varied considerably across Member States. Two Member States recorded no excess mortality, Romania (-13.3 percent) and Bulgaria (-7.4 percent), but among the remaining 25 Member States that recorded excess deaths, Slovenia was in first place and well above the European Union average!
In addition to Slovenia (21.3 percent), the highest excess mortality rates in December were recorded in Austria (20.7 percent) and Estonia (20.0 percent), followed by Germany (19.3 percent), Denmark (19.0 percent), the Netherlands (18.5 percent) and Slovakia (17.1 percent). Equally worrying, however, are the figures for Slovenia’s excess mortality rate for the whole of 2023. For eight months, we had an excess mortality rate above the European Union average of 6.9 percent – namely, in January, followed by significantly above-average rates of 8.8 percent in May, 11.2 percent in June and 10.8 percent in July, and then again in October with 8.9 percent, 14.3 percent in November, and 21.3 percent in December.
Prime Minister Golob and the Minister of Health continue to ignore the problem
Slovenian public healthcare is on the brink of collapse, and the two people most responsible for this situation, Prime Minister Dr Robert Golob, and Dr Valentina Prevolnik Rupel, the Minister of Health, continue to pretend that there are actually no problems there. Perhaps they will be dismayed by the figures of an increasingly elderly Slovenian society, which will only need healthcare even more, or the figures of suicides by young people due to mental distress, who are waiting an unacceptably long time for help in the Slovenian public healthcare system, and the figures of excess deaths, which may also be the result of the chaos in the public healthcare system.
For this reason, the Slovenian Democratic Party parliamentary group recently proposed that a discussion on this topic should be held by the Committee on Health, followed by the adoption of the following two conclusions:
- The Committee on Health calls on the Ministry of Health to submit an analysis of the causes of the high number of excess deaths in Slovenia in 2023.
- The Committee on Health calls on the Ministry of Health to submit, within three months, measures to prevent a high percentage of excess mortality in Slovenia in the future.
Ž. K.
