Finland continues wartime preparedness in next year’s healthcare budget

Finland’s government plans to allocate €67 million in next year’s budget to improve healthcare readiness and preparedness for the Defence Forces. Nearly €40 million of that sum will go toward procurement.

The work will involve the Defence Forces, Finland’s wellbeing services counties, the City of Helsinki and HUS. Altogether, the regions are expected to receive around €300 million for preparedness over five years. The government provided €104 million through a supplementary budget last year for preparations against military force or the threat of its use.

The spending comes as the government cuts funding elsewhere in social and healthcare services. Grants to social and health organizations, for example, will fall by €84 million next year. A law passed last year requires the wellbeing services counties to prepare for military force and gives them new responsibilities, including protecting healthcare facilities, making operations transferable, expanding emergency medical resources and cooperating with the Defence Forces and NATO.

The government has not disclosed how the money will be distributed among the regions. The preparedness work is based in part on experience from the war in Ukraine. A parliamentary social affairs and health committee visited Ukraine last October, including a children’s hospital and a military hospital.

“The war in Ukraine has shown in a cruel way that hospitals and healthcare infrastructure are not protected in warfare, quite the opposite,” said Mia Laiho, deputy chair of the parliamentary committee. Frontline services must be able to receive large numbers of seriously injured patients and transfer them quickly to specialized units elsewhere in Finland or abroad.

Russian attacks on hospitals in Ukraine have also highlighted the need for mobile healthcare operations that can move to other settings or replace facilities destroyed in strikes. Finnish planning has also focused on bomb shelters equipped to treat surgical patients. The law estimates that much of the cost will involve building or converting facilities, creating transferable operations and training staff.

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The war in Ukraine has shown in a cruel way that hospitals and healthcare infrastructure are not protected in warfare, quite the opposite.