The research titled Public Healthcare Spends More, But Provides Less showed that: In the last 10 years, public procurement costs have increased by two and half times, from 126 million EUR in 2015 to more than 315 million EUR in 2024. Inflation-related factors are not sufficient to justify the enormous rise in value of public procurement.
There is a gap between increased value of public procurement and decline of services provided by public healthcare institutions, which gives rise to serious suspicions that public procurements are used as means to withdraw budget funds, instead of being an instrument to promote healthcare.
The highest value growth in public procurement is noted among clinics and hospitals. However, instead of more services and better care, the citizens are faced with a different reality – the value of tenders is on the rise, but operation of clinics and hospital declines. In the period 2015–2024, the number of medical consultations performed by all 55 clinics and hospitals was reduced by 14%, while the number of inpatient days was decreased by 24%.
Growing costs of healthcare public procurement cannot be justified with the number of specialist consultations. The last three years have seen an evident decline of specialist consultations by around 700,000, i.e. by 19%. In the field of gynaecology and obstetrics, as well as in the field of transfusion medicine, this decline exceeds 60%.
The research can be downloaded in Macedonian, Albanian and English language
For more information, please contact the Center for Civil Communications at (02) 3213-513 or at center@ccc.org.mk.
This research is conducted as part of the project “Combating Corruption in Healthcare Public Procurement”, implemented by the Centre for Civil Communications with financial support from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).