Emergency Ordinance 57/2018 has been issued in June, to ensure continuity care centres remain open, as 97% of the 2018 approved funds for this purpose have been already spent.
Continuity care centres ensure permanent (24 hours) provision of care. They result from the agreement among a group of family physicians to perform on-duty calls for their patients. At these centres, family doctors perform emergency tasks (e.g. first aid, referrals to laboratory or to secondary care level) and patients attend them when their family physician is off service and they are unable to wait another day.
By this legislation, the government supplemented the Ministry of Health budget with 25.1 million lei (about 5.4 million euros), which will be transferred to the National Health Insurance Fund. Family physicians will be paid additionally according to on-duty call hours (on top of the services offered in their own primary health care premises) by separate contracts with District Health Insurance Houses (DHIHs).
Currently, there are 352 continuity care centres in contract with DHIHs, and other 27 have expressed their interest.