Travel Tips Of Moldova

Immunization against typhoid is sometimes recommended.

The health system in Moldova possesses many features common to the Semashko model of the Soviet Union, but some important changes have occurred during the transition period. In response to a profound fiscal crisis, the health care system went through dramatic consolidation in the last 5 years with reductions in the number of hospital beds, activity levels and personnel. The health care system consists of three distinct tiers: primary, secondary, and tertiary care. The Primary Health Care sector has seen significant reform since 1996 and is now based on general practitioners, called family doctors (FD). Secondary care is provided by general hospitals. Their scope and structure changed in 1999, when judets were introduced. The former district hospitals were scaled down to an average of 215 beds and to 4-5 basic specialities, whereas the central judet hospitals (with 550 beds on average) provide a broader range of specialties and serve as referral institutions at the judet level. The Moldovan health care system is predominantly a public system: central government or local hospitals since it is largely made on an ad-hoc basis, depending on the amount of financial resources available. Out-of-pocket payments at the point of delivery are significant 11 and represent one of the biggest issues in the Moldovan health system. There are services for which patients pay officially according to the regulation in force (for example, an amount per bed-day, laboratory tests, X-ray films etc). These payments accounted for 19% of total health spending in 2002. 12 However, patients having to use private pharmacies incur the biggest share of out-of-pocket health expenditure, since they have to buy all of their ambulatory drug treatments and most of the medications required during a hospital stay. These individual expenditures are difficult to trace and they are not included in the aggregated figures of health spending.

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