More Hungarians work in the British health care system than Americans

As we already reported, thousands of Hungarian doctors and nurses work abroad for higher wages and because of the better working conditions. In fact, most of them work in Great-Britain, Germany and Switzerland. According to napi.hu, a British Parliament report shows that more Hungarians (1,187) work in the British NHS than Americans (1179). Consequently, there is an ever-growing labour shortage in many sectors of the Hungarian health care.

The most crucial problem is money

Clearly, the most critical issue of the Hungarian health care system is that there are not enough doctors and nurses because they are extremely overloaded and underpaid. This is because the government does not spend enough money from the state budget on health care. According to the Hungarian Medical Chamber, the Hungarian health care system

needs at least 6-700 billion HUF (EUR 2.25M).

The Hungarian health care system even fell behind the Central-European countries of the region in this issue. In fact, the Hungarian healthcare expenditure per capita is only half of the EU-28. To make matters worse, even Slovakia and Slovenia outran Hungary in this regard. Because of the low wages, most of the nurses have more than one job. However,

their tiredness can threaten proper health care service

Thus, Independent Trade Union of Healthcare Workers prepared in January for a strike.

As a result, it is not surprising that more and more doctors and nurses seek better wages in Western-European countries.

Government says that the situation is getting better

Wage increases, support for junior doctors, healthcare development projects and increased resources are behind the turnaround, human resources state secretary Bence Rétvári told a press conference last year. Furthermore, he added in December that

there are more doctors staying in Hungary