Paper rebukes NIJZ over wait times in healthcare

Koper – In Saturday’s commentary headlined Patients Not the Only Ones to Be Blamed for Waiting Times, the newspaper Primorske Novice says that the National Institute of Public Health (NIJZ) is also to be blamed for long waiting times, having done nothing to ensure a single system of referrals registration at national level.

The paper says that it is unacceptable that the system of keeping waiting lists in healthcare, which has been run by NIJZ for years, has so many flaws that it allows for a patient with a referral to be in line for a certain procedure at several providers.

This would not be possible if the country had a single, unified system of waiting times linked and coordinated from one place at the highest level, while NIJZ now receives waiting time data from the eHealth system and from IT systems of individual hospitals.

The paper says that the country getting a single system “should in the first place be up to NIJZ, which is more than clearly not up to the task”.

Duplication of referrals would not be possible if all relevant data was accessible to all, if every time a new patient is registered for a certain medical procedure, the system would show whether and where that patient is already booked for the same procedure.

Over the years, NIJZ has not managed to clean up the waiting lists nor ensured that all the data of all medical services providers is displayed and accessible, concludes the commentary.

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