Trying to Solve the Crisis by Further Exhausting Doctors Is a Dead End

Fides, Slovenia's trade union for doctors and dentists, says raising doctors' workload quotas would push the healthcare crisis in the wrong direction. The union agrees that access to healthcare, especially at the primary-care level, is one of the biggest problems facing Slovenian healthcare.

It rejects the argument that doctors' workload standards are a key cause of the current situation. In Fides' view, that explanation confuses cause and effect. The standards did not create the shortage of doctors. They emerged because there is a limit to how many patients and how much work one doctor can handle over the long term.

Exceeding that limit, the union says, would reduce the quality and safety of care and threaten doctors' own health. The fact that an individual doctor could have had far more registered patients decades ago does not, by itself, show what that doctor's actual workload was.

Fides argues that the staffing shortage cannot be addressed mainly by assigning each doctor more patients. Its position is that access will improve through more doctors and better working conditions, rather than through higher quotas.