Permanent Medical Centers – Premises for Increasing Accessibility to Health Services in Rural Communities (Iasi County)

Abstract

In Romania, rural areas are deficient in terms of health coverage compared to urban areas, which directly affects the health status of the rural population and indirectly the social, economic and sustainable development situation of the country. The decentralized Romanian health system is part of the Eastern European countries' patterns, facing worrying problems which require real and rapid solutions to reform and modernize the health system.The purpose of this work is to analyze the accessibility of the rural population in Iasi county to primary medical care through permanent centers, medical units, which operate outside the normal working hours of individual medical offices and are served by family doctors, who are mainly providing treatment of minor emergencies. From a methodological point of view, the study is based on descriptive and comparative analysis of general data provided by the National Institute of Statistics and secondary data obtained from doctors' questionnaires from 14 permanent centers in rural Iasi County. The centers provide information about the annual number of patients, the age and the predominant sex, the medical services most often performed, the diseases that patients suffer from most often, the way in which the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic 19 influenced the number of interventions etc. The final results will outline the importance of permanent centers in rural areas, the accessibility of the population to urban centers of emergency mayors, the population they serve and their efficiency within the Ministry of Health. The European Union through cohesion policy and non-reimbursable European funds supports health policies in our country to ensure better quality emergency health care in rural Romania as well.