Paul Goble
Staunton, Sept. 9 – The Russian health ministry has dropped from its standard listing of professionals hospitals must have the positions of specialists on diabetics, ophthalmologists, child psychiatrists, and sexologists, as well as ten others while adding a few new ones, including nutritionists and gerontologists.
Those in the specialties the ministry has eliminated will not be let go immediately. Instead, they will be allowed to continue until their contracts run out. After that, the hospitals will be required to offer them new positions in which they will be compelled to work in another specialty as well (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/09/09/bez-podrostkovogo-psikhiatra-diabetologa-i-seksologa).
“The main question,” Alfiya Mustafina of Novaya Gazeta says, is how these arrangements will affect medical care, with a more immediate one as to whether it is simply an economy move or an effort to cover up the fact that Russia now has a shortage of more than 23,000 doctors.
Just how large this shortage currently is, she says, is in fact unknown, given that the health ministry has not released any updated data since 2024. If doctors with one specialty are now forced to work at two, that may allow the ministry to put out figures suggesting that Moscow has adequately addressed the shortage in medical personnel.
But however that may be, the doctors involved are going to be increasingly overworked; and their patients aren’t going to be able to get the care they need, especially in fields where the demand is great or where medical advances are taking place so rapidly that doctors trying to keep in two or more fields will fall behind.
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