Health centres must find temporary cover for departing doctors

Health centres will have to find temporary cover for patients when a family doctor leaves, under a bill approved by the government on Thursday, ERR reported. The substitute must be arranged for up to three months and may stay longer by agreement. If no new family doctor is found after that, the Estonian Health Insurance Fund will organise further cover.

In general, a family doctor who wants to leave a health centre with their patient list must give six months’ notice, although a shorter period can be agreed. The change is intended to give the centre time to reorganise its work.

If patients are left without family doctor care, the Health Board may consider taking the patient list away from the doctor after 30 days, instead of the current 60.

A family doctor’s list may have up to 2,000 patients, or up to 2,400 if an additional doctor is available. Existing patients will not have to change doctors. The bill identifies 1,600 patients as the preferred list size.

A doctor with more than 1,600 patients may refuse to take on a new patient only if that person can join another list in the same area with fewer than 1,600 patients. The doctor must also tell the patient where to find information about those lists. The aim is to distribute workloads more evenly.

The bill now goes to parliament, with the changes scheduled to take effect on March 1 next year. At the beginning of this year, Estonia had 77 patient lists without a permanent family doctor, covering more than 132,000 people. That meant nearly a tenth of the population received family doctor care from substitutes.