Lifelong vaccination strategy as a tool against pandemics in Hungary / Élethosszan át tartó oltási stratégia mint eszköz a pandémiák elleni védekezésben Magyarországon

Due to various factors, the chances of infectious disease emergence or re-emergence have increased in the 21st century, thus, the likelihood of new emerging pandemics has also increased. The COVID-19 pandemic, which appeared in 2019, has highlighted that certain new and re-emerging infectious diseases - in the case of lack or delay in effective measures - can spread very rapidly. The main tool for the fight against infectious diseases is immunization through vaccination. While focusing on the personal health, public health, economic and societal benefits of a lifelong immunization strategy, especially in light of the aging society, the goal of this paper is to present the benefits of vaccines. In order to increase the added value of vaccinations it is recommended to create a lifelong immunization strategy.

A reversal of fortune: Comparison of health system responses to COVID-19 in the Visegrad group during the early phases of the pandemic.

This paper analyses the health policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the four Visegrad countries - Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia - in spring and summer 2020. The four countries implemented harsh transmission prevention measures at the beginning of the pandemic and managed to effectively avoid the first wave of infections during spring. Likewise, all four relaxed most of these measures during the summer and experienced uncontrolled growth of cases since September 2020. Along the way, there has been an erosion of public support for the government measures. This was mainly due to economic considerations taking precedent but also likely due to diminished trust in the government. All four countries have been overly reliant on their relatively high bed capacity, which they managed to further increase at the cost of elective treatments, but this could not always be supported with sufficient health workforce capacity. Finally, none of the four countries developed effective find, test, trace, isolate and support systems over the summer despite having relaxed most of the transmission protection measures since late spring. This left the countries ill-prepared for the rise in the number of COVID-19 infections they have been experiencing since autumn 2020.

The 2020 reform of the employment status of Hungarian health workers: Will it eliminate informal payments and separate the public and private sectors from each other?

Hungary, like many countries, features a complex mix of the public and private sector in the financing and provision of health care services. At the same time, the health system also faces challenges related to shortages of health professionals, low public financing, and informal payments. With the added pressure from the COVID-19 pandemic, Hungarian policymakers acted rapidly to pass a sweeping regulation aimed at these issues. Over two days, the Hungarian parliament introduced and unanimously approved a new regulation, Act C of 2020 on the Employment Status of Health Workers, that replaces the existing public employment relationship between health professionals, public providers and their controlling authorities. The Act, passed on 6 October 2020, brings the employment of health workers under strict central control by introducing a new employment status similar to that of the armed forces. The Act also provides doctors with an unprecedented 120% salary increase and criminalizes informal payments. The reception has been overwhelmingly negative, with thousands of health professionals indicating that they would not sign the new contracts, and the policy also contains serious technical and feasibility concerns. Although the first statistics show that only about 3-5% of the active workforce did not sign the contract by 1 March 2021, the implementation of the reform still faces serious challenges.