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Country profiles of health system responses to the crisis | Slovenia
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• Moratorium on new employment and compulsory retirement introduced
for health workers meeting the criteria (2012).
• Limits imposed on temporary employment and contractual part-time
work (2012).
• Effective reduction of health workers' salaries by 5–15% through the
measures outlined above.
• Reduction of on-call service payments by 5% (2011).
Payment to providers
• The Health Insurance Institute of Slovenia reduced the price of health
services (generally) by 2.5%, additionally reduced expenditure on tertiary
services by 5% and implemented penalties for health care providers
related to breach of the contract between the fund and the provider
(2009). Further reductions were made in 2010.
• The Health Insurance Institute reduced the costs of administrative staff
for providers and the costs of tertiary services, outpatient psychiatric care,
positron emission tomography, computed tomography and expensive
medicines used in hospitals only (2011). The total effect of these measures
was a saving of €12.5 million in 2011 and it was estimated to be a further
€11.1 million in 2012.
• Payments to providers were reduced by 3% across the board regardless of
previous signed prices in annual contracts; in the same year, the reduction
of prices in contracts with the Health Insurance Institute eventually
reached 8%, with contracts to hospitals automatically reducing payments
by 5% (2012). These moves pushed hospitals further into deficit.
Overhead costs: restructuring the Ministry of Health and purchasing agencies
• Selective reduction of material and direct costs by the Health Insurance
Institute (2009), without undergoing restructuring or any significant
reduction in the number of employees or budgets.
Provider infrastructure and capital investment
• Investments were stopped or reduced as a result of central budget cuts
(2008 and 2011) (but some previously planned investments in emergency
services were continued).
Priority setting or protocols to change access to treatments, coordination
of care and patterns of use
• Introduction of new protocols for care of patients with chronic conditions in
primary care, which included the introduction of additional nurses tasked
with preventive activities into the primary care team (2011). The aim was