UrBC, Yekaterinburg, October 25, 2018. About nine hundred more doctors are still needed in Sverdlovsk Region, the constituency’s Healthcare Minister Andrei Tsvetkov announced at a press conference in Yekaterinburg on October 24, 2018.

‘These are both currently unfilled job openings and the potential replacements for doctors going into retirement,’ the minister said.

According to Tsvetkov, locations in Sverdlovsk Region’s north suffer from medical staff shortage particularly badly.

The Healthcare Ministry is now trying to make up for the shortage by hiring both local medical school graduates and doctors from Tyumen Region, Kurgan Region, and Perm Territory.

‘The number of doctors working in the constituency is now 4% larger than one year earlier. We have 12,000 people working in state-run clinics and a few more thousand in private and federally-run ones,’ Tsvetkov said.

Rector of Ural State Medical University Olga Kovtun said, in her turn, that over six hundred new doctors had completed their training in 2018. However, only a half of them went on with residency training. In fact, there are only 126 state scholarships to cover the fees, and 200 offers from potential employers to fund the tuition.