Health reforms in Bulgaria will be left for the next government, the most recently released legislative programme of the current Government made clear. The Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) is intending to re-evaluate models of healthcare in Western Europe, and that would take more time than initially anticipated, the deputy director of the parliamentary health commission, Todor Kunchev, said.

Experts from Brain Trust, a programme created by Health Minister Evgenii Zhelev, also from the BSP, have arrived at the conclusion that after six months of research, "they need more time for discussions," Dnevnik daily reported on January 21 2009.

"We need to take our time and visit several Western European countries and look into their model, and then we need more time, still, to decide what model we will use here in Bulgaria. We will also include private health funds in the discussions," Kunchev said, as quoted by Dnevnik.

For the parties Turkish-led Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) and National Movement for Stability and Progress (NMSP), their decision has been to not exert any pressure on the socialist-led Government. "We have written a new bill for health insurance that was submitted to the Health Ministry, so now the ball is in the BSP's court," MRF MP Yordan Tsonev said.

This will transpire as the second consecutive mandate in which the Government in power has failed to act on the health reform.

Initially, it was blocked by the NMSP and the MRF as they undertook actions to freeze the privatisations of the health institutions - municipal hospitals and polyclinics were finally allowed to be sold less than six months ago, but even until now the Government hasn't actually participated or allowed any transaction or change of ownership to take place. The reason for this is because "there is no 'health card' [ie, evaluative list] as of yet to determine the exact number of hospitals the country needs - this has been the driving issue of the tripartite coalition since the beginning of the mandate, and the issue is unresolved," a spokesman for the BSP told Dnevnik.

Meanwhile, the Health Ministry is introducing a bill for the creation of a medical inspectorate that will be comprised of medical staff and patients representatives. The inspectorate is meant to supervise the financial expenditures and facilitate the management and the quality of service in Bulgaria's medical institutions. Furthermore, it will be able to "give technical or operational advice when necessary or suggest change of management for a poorly performing medical facility - should breaches of regulation or financial mishandling be observed," said Kunchev.