The government has reviewed the progress of the national project "Modernisation of Rural Healthcare".
According to data from the official information resource of the Prime Minister of Kazakhstan, 99 primary healthcare facilities were built under the project last year.
The construction of another 556 medical and feldsher-midwife points and outpatient clinics is expected in the future.
The project also provides for the modernisation of 32 central district hospitals.
As reported at the government meeting, relevant work is already underway at 10 facilities, and major repairs have been completed at two medical institutions.
It is noted that during 2023-2024, 656 medical workers found employment at 152 healthcare facilities.
In total, the programme promises to permanently employ 1,100 specialists.
At the same time, delays relative to the schedule were recorded in the Karaganda, Almaty, and Zhetysu regions.
Olzhas Bektenov noted that 60.3 billion tenge was allocated for the implementation of the national project. According to the Prime Minister, the regions have already received more than 21 billion tenge.
It should be recalled that the project, aimed at improving the level of medical care in rural areas, is being implemented from 2023 to 2025.
The total funding volume for this period could amount to 217.7 billion tenge.
It is expected that by 2026, all rural settlements in the country will have access to medical care under the project.
Indeed, rural healthcare is in dire need of modernisation, and in some cases, the mere existence of a medical facility will be a significant event for local residents.
At the same time, the problem of access to medical care, caused by a basic shortage of medical facilities and qualified specialists, has been noted for several years now.
Rather, not just a few years, but decades.
The state is not standing idly by on this issue. On the contrary, over the entire period of independence, the government has implemented many large-scale programmes in the healthcare sector.
However, the issue here is perhaps not the number of projects, nor even the funds spent on them.
Probably, the public may soon be interested in another question, namely, when the success of healthcare modernisation will become noticeable not only in government agency reports but also in real life.
In 2016, Kazakhstan approved the state healthcare development programme "Densaulyk" for 2016 - 2019.
The first version of the project indicated that total costs would amount to about 2 trillion tenge. In 2018, the programme was updated by a government decree, and costs were reduced to 945 billion tenge.
The main goal of the project was to increase the average life expectancy of the population to 73.13 years, increase the health index to 0.815, and satisfaction with the quality of medical care to 48% by 2020.
One only needs to recall 2020 and the start of the coronavirus to understand that the state did not achieve its expected goals.
It is obvious that COVID-19 reduced the average life expectancy of the population. This indicator began to recover only in 2022.
The epidemic not only increased the percentage of dissatisfaction with the quality of medicine but also once again exposed the shortcomings of the entire healthcare system.
Soon, the Ministry of Health developed the national project "Quality and Accessible Healthcare for Every Citizen "Healthy Nation", which was launched in 2021.
And although the project, with a total cost of 3.6 trillion tenge, was supposed to be completed only by 2026, discrepancies between the expected goals and actual results became apparent as early as 2023.
For example, the main goal of this project was to increase the share of domestic pharmaceutical products from 17% in 2020 to 50% in 2025.
In 2022, the head of the Ministry of Health, then Azhar Giniyat, announced an increase in pharmaceutical production volumes.
But even this was not enough, as the stated volumes could meet only 24% of the country's need for medicines.
Furthermore, in 2022, the department recorded a shortage of 7,740 full-time equivalent positions in healthcare facilities. It was then that they first began to talk about the new project "Modernisation of Rural Healthcare".
How rational it is to launch two similar projects in parallel is, of course, an open question.
At the same time, regardless of the number of state projects, it is worth saying that the shortage of medical facilities and qualified specialists was noted before, during, and after the coronavirus.
During the launch of the "Healthy Nation" project in 2021, the Minister of Health Alexey Tsoi spoke about the implementation of the election programme of the "Nur Otan" party.
The department promised to work on ensuring the accessibility of medical care in rural settlements, and by 2025 to repair and build 1,095 primary healthcare facilities.
Incidentally, in 2022, under the "Auyl – El Besigi" programme, the repair of healthcare facilities was actively undertaken in the Kostanay region.
The minister also mentioned increasing human resources potential in the healthcare sector and adhering to the "golden hour" principle for the timely provision of emergency medical care.
Interestingly, these promises largely repeat the target indicators outlined in the national project "Modernisation of Rural Healthcare", launched in 2023.
In 2010, Kazakhstan launched the state programme "Salamatty Kazakhstan", better known as the "Medical Train" project, under which residents of remote settlements can undergo free medical examinations.
The programme is still in operation today.
Talk of modernising healthcare in rural areas began as early as 2004. Back then, under the state programme "Rural Development", the project "Development of Mobile and Telemedicine in Rural Healthcare" was launched.
However, the full implementation of the project proved impossible due to the lack of quality communication in most remote settlements of the country.
Since then, the issue of telemedicine development has been raised repeatedly, but has never been fully resolved.
One of the main problems in modernising the healthcare system is often cited as a lack of funding.
For this reason, many countries often resort to support from international organisations.
For instance, in 2023, the World Health Organisation (WHO) allocated $1.8 million for the development of healthcare in Kazakhstan.
And here it is important to say that the healthcare sector requires constant renewal to meet modern standards. Sustainable development inevitably involves large costs.
The question is only how to wisely manage these funds so that, behind the multitude of expensive programmes, the long-awaited result finally becomes visible.