How Much Do We Spend on Health Centres

In the Republic of Moldova there are almost 240 health centres, or “polyclinics”, as they are also popularly called. For their operation, the state spent almost MDL 950 million in 2015. More details about the money spent on these institutions can be found in the infographic below. What are Health Centres? Health centres are the institutions where family doctors and their teams provide primary health care, including prophylaxis services, dental services and, sometimes, in the case of emergencies, minor surgical interventions (sutures, etc.). Here, too, family doctors refer patients to specialised hospitals, specialist doctors, etc. Every year, each citizen contributes through the National Public Budget MDL 263 for primary health care, or MDL 400 less than the global average. Traditionally, the best-funded Health Centres are those in district centres, whose budgets are more than 10 times larger than the budgets of villages with a comparable population. Likewise, the institutions in the North and Centre of the country are the best funded, with the highest share of expenditure per capita. This also holds true for specialised medical institutions (district hospitals and republican-level hospitals in the area). Moreover, poorly funded health centres struggle to pay salaries, to the detriment of medical services, and face a lack of medicines and investigation equipment. The infographic was developed within the Budget Transparency Monitoring project, implemented with the financial support of the Good Governance Programme of the Soros Foundation Moldova.