Directors of seven Israeli public hospitals on Sunday threatened to stop accepting new COVID-19 patients as of Monday, as they claim their resources will be stretched due to lack of adequate funding.
According to the general manager of the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, Dr. Ofer Merin, hospitals will also start working on a reduced basis from Wednesday, reducing the number of staff caring for patients.
“Here we are, several months after signing an agreement with the Ministries of Finance and Health. An agreement that has been breached,” Merin said.
“There are seven hospital heads sitting here who have gone through four waves of COVID-19. We work day and night, seven days a week, to save Israel and its hardest hit cities. We’ve been working for a year and a half now. our employees day and night ”.
According to Merin, the country’s public hospitals suffer from a severe lack of funding despite the government approving an addition of NIS 2 billion to the country’s health system.
“Most of the transferred budgets, as can be read in the state control report, go directly from the Ministry of Health to government hospitals,” Merin said. “The distribution of the hospital budget is not the same.”
The director of the English Hospital in Nazareth, Dr Fahed Hakim, said that although the Ministry of Health had promised to hire 2,000 more staff from the hospital, its hospital has faced a short staffing. due to budgetary constraints.
“We released our staff, doctors, nurses and all the paramedics at the end of the month because the money is gone,” Hakim said.
“Our problem now is that we are facing a cash flow crisis. We do not have someone to close the deficits and pay the salaries,” Hakim added. the most. It’s not good “.
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Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz and Director General of the Ministry of Health Professor Nachman Ash meet with directors of Israeli public hospitals
The Minister of Health, Nitzan Horowitz, and the Director General of the Ministry of Health, Professor Nachman Ash, quickly called the directors of the hospitals to discuss the matter. “We’re there, we’ll meet and you’ll be heard,” Horowitz said.
Under the agreement signed in January, all hospitals together received NIS 105 million each month for their operation and the purchase of urgent equipment and medicines. The agreement is supposed to provide hospitals with budgetary security while ensuring that salaries to employees are paid in full and payments to providers throughout 2021.
Meanwhile, severe coronavirus cases in Israel continued to peak, as the count rose to 669 on Sunday evening, a record since the start of the fourth wave.
The Ministry of Health reported that 669 COVID-19 patients were hospitalized in serious condition, of which 107 are connected to ventilators.
Health authorities also reported that 3,745 people have tested positive for coronavirus in some 65,000 tests performed since midnight, bringing the country’s infection rate to 5.9%.
The national number of coronaviruses has reached 6,830, of which 352 died in August alone.