The government yesterday agreed to increase the amount of money for investments in the health sector, with the higher costs related to the rising cost of construction, according to Health Ministry spokesman Ondrej Jakob. The new pavilions in seven state hospitals were originally supposed to cost CZK 11.6 billion, but the new estimate is CZK 21 billion. A total of CZK 14.5 billion is to come from the state budget, six billion more than originally planned.
“The initial documentation of the Health Ministry’s original strategic investment programme was drawn up and subsequently approved back in 2016, at the price level of the time of its creation,” Jakob said.
The state was to contribute CZK 8.5 billion to the seven construction projects. In Prague, the construction of a central emergency reception building at the Thomayer University Hospital is planned. In 2020, the hospital said it would cost CZK 835 million, while this year the hospital’s director, Zdenek Beneš, estimated the cost at CZK 1.5 billion.
A new combined facility is also planned by the General University Hospital in Prague. In 2020, director David Felt said the 1.5 billion building will replace the current building of the Clinic of Otorhinolaryngology (ENT) in pavilion A7, part of which is already closed due to disrepair. The new building will house the ENT and biochemistry departments, and the internal emergency room and the transfusion department will be moved there from Zbraslav.
Part of the investment plan is also the construction of pavilions G1 and G2 at the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine (IKEM) for more than CZK 1 billion, which started in 2021 and is expected to be completed in May 2024. The hospital expects to expand its capacities, especially for transplants, with the new facility.
Among the strategic investments is also the new construction of the main building B of the University Hospital Olomouc, according to data from 2020, which was expected to cost two billion crowns. This year, the management of the University Hospital Brno also estimated the cost of a new maternity ward on the Bohunice campus at roughly the same amount. The cost of building the pavilion of surgical specialties at the University Hospital in Plzeň has increased by CZK 1.7 billion since 2017, and last year it was estimated at CZK 3.9 billion. The modernisation of the surgical facility at the Hradec Králové University Hospital is expected to cost 4.3 billion, the hospital management announced in May this year that it had obtained a building permit.
“Due to the time lag since the start of the programme, some of the projects had to be updated in terms of their content and to take into account the increase in the price of building materials, along with their increasingly poor availability, which significantly complicate and make the preparation and implementation of individual projects more difficult,” Jakob added. The Ministry of Health will therefore split the investment programme into two parallel programmes.
At the same time, in the budget for 2024, the Ministry of Health has just less for investments than this year. However, it wants to use unspent money from this year, one billion will be transferred. Any further co-financing of European projects will be dealt with in time of need by a budget measure. The consolidation package will also allow the new hospitals, as state-funded organisations, to finance their investments with loans.
Source: CTK
