Health Ministry wants all major operations performed at specialist centres by 2030

Specialist centres already perform three quarters of the roughly 17,000 most complex operations carried out in the Czech Republic each year, most of them cancer surgeries. The Health Ministry wants to move all such procedures to specialist centres by 2030, including the roughly 4,000 operations that are still performed elsewhere.

Health Minister Adam Vojtěch (ANO) stressed that experience is crucial to the success of complex surgeries. He said this is demonstrated by international studies involving tens of thousands of patients as well as by Czech data.

Smaller hospitals are warning against excessive centralisation, saying it could affect the availability of healthcare and make it harder for them to attract doctors.