In October 2024 Lithuanian parliamentary elections resulted in a tri-party coalition between the Social Democratic Party, the new nationalist party Dawn of Nemunas, and the Union of Democrats “For Lithuania”. By December 2024, the Lithuanian Parliament endorsed a new government programme, which includes a comprehensive focus on health and healthcare. The central goal is to improve the quality and accessibility of health services, increase life expectancy, and promote health through better nutrition and physical activity. Additionally, the government has committed to increasing public spending on health, slowing privatization, ensuring adequate geographical distribution of healthcare providers, and reducing administrative burdens for healthcare professionals. More specifically, the government programme outlines a number of envisaged actions that can be summarized around the following areas.
Governance and regulation
The programme emphasizes the importance of involvement of patients, carers, and health professionals in healthcare reforms. It plans to address AI use in healthcare and the improvement of the e-health system, along with increasing preparedness and enhancing coordination between ministries to strengthen the healthcare system against potential civil, hybrid, or military threats. It also suggests to focus on expanding clinical research, improving funding, and fostering collaborations between research centres, universities, and private sectors.
Financing
The government plans to increase public funding for state-insured individuals, revise NHIF reimbursement prices for publicly financed services, and ensure the effective functioning of the public healthcare provider network through long-term infrastructure investments. It also aims to remove co-payments for publicly funded health services. It aims to remove privileges of private providers contracted by the NHIF when providing publicly financed services.
Workforce
Government aims to make an effort to attract and retain medical professionals by expanding training programs, improving working conditions and remuneration, reducing administrative burden and offering social security guarantees. To reduce regional disparities, it plans to expand medical and nursing training programmes, fund all medical residency places, and provide social support for medical students from rural areas.
Service provision, access, and quality
The aim is to establish patient-centred, equitable healthcare with timely access and high-quality services. This includes ensuring provision of primary care close to home and provision of high-quality specialist services in a more centralized way or via remote consultations. Primary care initiatives include incentivizing family doctors to provide a comprehensive set of services and expanding the role of municipal health centres in provision of ambulatory and day care services. In specialist care, it supports the provision of AMI, stroke, major trauma, and cancer services based on clusters, and centralizing highly specialist care in centres of excellence, with further development of patient transportation services. The government also plans to enhance long-term and palliative care, increase vaccination coverage, reduce unnecessary treatments, and shorten waiting times.
On pharmaceuticals, the government aims to develop medicines policy to ensure access to innovative and effective treatments, improve the reimbursement system, and involve patient organizations in decision-making. Further proposed actions focus on improving the availability of medicines for rare diseases and expanding the role of pharmacists in healthcare service delivery.
For public health, the programme includes measures to promote health literacy, support physical activity, and encourage healthy lifestyles at various levels, such as in schools, workplaces, and communities, and promote healthy eating by reducing VAT on fresh fruits and vegetables. The government also plans to increase access to sexual health services, improve the availability of contraceptives and period products.
In mental health, the focus is on reducing mental health stigma, improving mental health literacy, and developing community-based mental health services. Further actions include expanding follow-up care for people treated for addictive disorders and ensuring adequate and multidisciplinary mental healthcare for children and support for their families. The programme envisages development of a comprehensive mental health and suicide prevention program.
The programme reflects ambitious plans for the health system, tackling many of the long-standing issues. Many of the same aspects have been tackled by previous governments; however, the evidence of the impact of preceding reforms is scarce.