Bulgaria’s largest emergency hospital, Pirogov, based in Sofia, needed an urgent aid of 12.5 million leva from the state to be able to avoid insolvency, a report by the newly appointed management of the hospital said, as quoted by mediapool.bg on October 17.

The money would cover the hospital debts and back the efforts of the board of directors to reform it and bring it back on track. In early August 2007, Pirogov, which is state-owned and is supervised by the Healthcare Ministry, had unsettled debts to suppliers amounting to 11 million leva. The debt was expected to reach 15 million leva by the end of 2007, the report said.

Pirogov had been lacking enough funding since 2003 because its expenditure considerably exceeded the state subsidy plus the money the hospital gets from the National Health Insurance Fund for treating patients. The average annual loss of Pirogov had been around eight million leva, despite the low wages paid to doctors and other personnel.

The hospital’s financial reports for the last five years gave the impression that the losses were going down. Pirogov even reported a profit of six million leva for 2006. The reports looked like that because Healthcare Ministry intervened with subsidies in 2005 and 2006, which saved the hospital from being declared insolvent by medicines’ suppliers for failing to pay its debts, the report said.