ECONOMIC ASSESSMENT OF REFORMING CHANGES TO HEALTHCARE FACILITIES IN THE SUMY REGION

The first stage of reforms in the healthcare sector of Ukraine has been completed. The healthcare industry is expected to become an integrated cross-sectoral system that would not only address medical and social issues in a more efficient way, but may turn out to be one of the key growth drivers for the Ukrainian economy. It is therefore expedient to assess the organizational, financial and economic consequences of transformations entailed by the national healthcare reform. The purpose of the article is to analyze and provide an economic assessment of the impact that the healthcare reform has on the activities of regional healthcare facilities by the example of the Sumy region. Writing this article, the author used both general research methods (such as analysis, synthesis, deduction, and grouping) and special economic methods (such as comparison, tabular summarization, and graphical analysis). The article examines individual indicators characterizing the accessibility of primary care services for residents of the Sumy region, such as the number of healthcare facilities and the number of physicians providing primary care, the number of declarations signed by individual healthcare facilities depending on their form of ownership and the type of locality. The author also assesses the level of healthcare expenditures before and after the reform, and comes to a conclusion that the funding of certain regional healthcare facilities has increased significantly. A separate comparative analysis has been conducted to understand the dependence of the financing a healthcare facility gets on the number of declarations it signed with patients. The dependence is found to be proportionate. However, there are still problems with efficient use of funds at local levels. Measures are being taken in the region to increase the verifiability of state funding allocated for healthcare and to make the use of financial and material resources by healthcare facilities more transparent. The goal is to minimize inefficient spending of resources. The region's former public healthcare facilities have been reformed into non-profit communal enterprises. Moreover, there are also private medical institutions and self-employed physicians in the Sumy region, which increases the accessibility of healthcare services and promotes competition in the sector making healthcare providers improve the quality of their services.