This year, the National Union of Private Hospitals (NUPH) celebrated its 10th anniversary.
The anniversary was celebrated in April 2023 at a solemn meeting and seminar with journalists in the city of Burgas, on the Black Sea. The initiative was attended by а dozen of journalists, representatives of the local and central authorities, friends and partners of the union.
The National Union of Private Hospitals was established in the spring of 2013 by a group of enthusiasts, representatives of private hospital healthcare, with the aim of protecting and promoting the private initiative in healthcare, opposing the attempts to limit the development of successful structures for hospital care, protecting equality and fair competition between medical facilities and participating in the formation and implementation of health care policies in Bulgaria.
NUPH has grown as a coalition of hospitals that are willing to share widely their experience and managerial capacity for the development and implementation of best practices and most advanced approaches in hospital care that ensure the patient’s right to choice and access to quality and modern medical care. Nowadays it has 24 members and represents 25% of the beds in private hospitals in Bulgaria, with more than 3,000 employees.
Over the years of its existence, NUPH has proven itself as the most influential hospital association in Bulgaria due to its clear, consistent and uncompromising position in defense of the private initiative as the best provider of quality and timely medical services for Bulgarian citizens.
Some of the most important achievements of the union are related to the successful fight against the discrimination of the private initiative and the attempts to impose senseless and restrictive regulatory requirements against it. NUPH has led and won over 50 cases against similar decisions of the Council of Ministers, the Ministry of Health and other ministries, the National Health Insurance Fund, state agencies and other regulatory bodies. On all issues related to changes in health legislation and the health care system, the union has issued hundreds of timely, clear and consistent declarations, opinions and proposals, including legislative ones.
As a result of this activity, NUPH successfully deflected attempts to:
- introduction of the requirement that private hospitals should perform public procurement for their activities;
- limiting the volume of activity carried out by hospitals;
- limitation of medical activity by region;
- forced imposing the requirements of collective labor agreements as a condition for performance of hospital activities;
Along with this NUPH was able to unite the hospital sector around the idea of an obligatory annual indexation of the prices of medical activities and impose this idea on the funding bodies. We also managed to enforce the right to be paid for the activity, regardless of the introduced restrictions on its volume, and to get the National Assembly to vote on a special amendment to the law for this.
Even today, NUPH continues its struggle to uphold equal, fair and progressive social and economic relations in health care for the sake of the health and prosperity of Bulgarian citizens.
