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Five main characteristics of the Ukrainian healthcare market

Olena Lepeshyna, 02.11.2015

When we talk about the Ukrainian market of medical services we do the point at some characteristics:

1/ The whole level of morbidity has had no appreciable changes and goes according to the amount of population during the last 7-10 years. The structure of diseases has no big changes too.

2/ The structure of the Ukrainian medical providers has changed a lot among private medical centers and had no changes is the public sector, but the whole market structure changes very slowly in last 10 years.

According to the official data, there are about 13 thousand medical centers financed by the Ukrainian budget, more than 3.5 thousand of private medical centers and about 1.5 thousand of private doctors today.

The most developed segments of the private sector of the Ukrainian healthcare are

  • Laboratory
  • Pediatric center
  • Hospital that contains policlinic and surgical direction
  • Polyclinic for adult
  • Diagnostic center
  • Maternity hospital (there is one functioning private maternity hospital today but there some projects more)

3/ The level of trust in the private sector of the Ukrainian medicine slowly but rises and shows up to 70% of trust for private medical laboratories in some regions. The trust rate to medical non-laboratory services is lower and depends on the region’s characteristics and the rate of government medical centers’ monopoly.

In Ukraine we have huge differences in the participants’ structure of the regional medical services market. Some regions have a lot of state and private medical centers, some regions have a few private medical centers and there is a lack of medical centers or a lack of medical quality in other regions.

Private medical centers are more trusted in big cities such as Kyiv, Odessa, Lviv, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk (it was in peaceful period of time, of course) than in small towns or not rich regions such as Zhytomyr, Vinnitsa, Mykolaiv and another where state medical centers are more trusted nowadays.

4/ Total income of the Ukrainian market of medical services in 2014 year was more than 27 billion hryvnias.

One third of the income of private medical centers belongs to 6 the biggest medical companies, two of which are laboratories.

The structure of private sector’s income in 2014:

2014

5/ Patients in Ukraine are more demanding today than 10 years before.

The first survey that estimated the level of trust in the private and public sectors of the Ukrainian health care was held in 2007 by MedExpert. After 2007 we did about 20 surveys and their results show us the level of trust in the private sector is high enough, but the level of trust to the government medical centers hasn’t changed for many years and is quite high today. In most cases this love to the state medical centers has nothing common with medical quality or quality of service. The cause of such sympathy is just absence of alternatives.

Now we can say that there are some general rules for Ukraine according to this theme:

  • The bigger city is the more demanding patients are.
  • Low level of competition between government and private sector decrease the rate of patients’ expectations.

 

09.11.2015

Olena Lepeshyna