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Despite war and sanctions, the government is committed to improving the performance of the Hungarian healthcare system year after year, said the Parliamentary State Secretary of the Ministry of Interior at the Semmelweis Day Award Ceremony, reports Magyar Nemzet.
Bence Rétvári stressed that, “Maintaining people’s health is a task that must not be forgotten even in times of war. Therefore, HUF 425 billion (EUR 1.1 billion) more funds will be available to the health sector next year compared to last year.”
He recalled that over the past decade, healthcare spending has increased more than two and a half times, from HUF 1,100 billion (EUR 3 billion) to HUF 3,200 billion (EUR 8.5 billion).
Rétvári also pointed out that
the number of doctors has grown significantly over the past decade: 1,000 to 1,500 graduates leave medical schools every year.
In 2010, nearly 34,000 physicians had a license to practice medicine in Hungary, while today there are more than 40,000, while the number of people applying for work permits abroad has dropped drastically to one-third, the State Secretary added.
State Secretary Bence Rétvári presents the Ignaz Semmelweis Award to András Vereczkei, Director of the Department of Surgery at Pécs University Hospital (R). Photo via MTI/Tibor Illyés
Recent priority measures include the abolition of the gratuity system, which had hampered the functioning of Hungary’s healthcare system for some 70 years, and the new on-call system, that is more fair and safer than the previous one.
In his tribute to Ignaz Semmelweis, the State Secretary said that many countries in the world are aware of who he was and any of them would have been proud to have had such an outstanding physician.
Ignaz Semmelweis. Photo via semmelweis.hu
It was only through the case of a colleague who was injured during an autopsy and died as a result that he realized that medical students were the cause of death, as they were both performing autopsies and assisting in childbirth in Vienna General Hospital. Semmelweis concluded that the cause was the lack of disinfection and that midwives should first clean their hands thoroughly with chlorine bleach.
In fact, from one month to the next, significantly fewer mothers died of childbed fever in the clinic.
Semmelweis is now considered as the “savior of mothers” in several parts of the world.
On the occasion of Semmelweis Day, five people were awarded the Ignaz Semmelweis Prize, fifteen received the László Batthyány Strattmann Prize, and 33 ministerial certificates of recognition were presented. The awards were presented by Rétvári and Péter Takács, Secretary of State for Health of the Ministry of Health.
Since 2011, July 1, the birthday of Ignaz Semmelweis, has been a public holiday for healthcare workers.
Via Magyar Nemzet, Featured photo via Pixabay