The Ministry of Health announced the idea of establishing a Medical Event Compensation Fund as early as July 2021. However, the project was submitted to the Permanent Committee of the Council of Ministers in late 2022. And this is about an extremely important tool in the health care system. The existence of the Medical Events Compensation Fund will make it easier to obtain payments for damages suffered by patients in the framework of relief events in the health care system. Particularly importantly, without the need for lengthy and complicated court proceedings and without the need to adjudicate the possible guilt of the doctor. The system proposed by the Health Ministry is modeled on solutions adopted in New Zealand, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, among others.
The proposed compensation amounts are lower than those obtainable in court proceedings. The overriding value, however, will be the lack of excessive formalization of the procedure, which may encourage some people to choose this path for settling their claims. The amount of benefits from the fund will depend on the consequences of the incident and will not exceed the amount of PLN 200,000 in the case of health damage and the amount of PLN 100,000 in the case of the death of the patient. The Compensation Fund Benefits Panel is to consist of nine members reviewing cases in three-person panels. It seems that such a small group has no chance of efficiently and quickly processing complaints coming in from across the system. The Health Policy Portal calls for the introduction of digital proceedings as the Fund's main method of operation, as well as the introduction of the possibility of supplementing information from the medical records of a case with the questioning of witnesses. The dispenser of the Fund will be the Patient Ombudsman, who has managed a similar Immunization Compensation Fund since January 2022. The initiators of the establishment of the Fund assume the simultaneous liquidation of the funds that have been operating for 10 years
