What will be your priority in the Sejm?

Kaja Filaczyńska: It will come as no surprise when I say—healthcare. I am a doctor specializing in endocrinology and obesity treatment. After studying medicine, I completed postgraduate studies in healthcare management. In my daily work and conversations with patients, I see what is not working in the Polish system, and I know how to change it.

Where should the changes begin?

Kaja Filaczyńska: First of all, with a significant increase in funding. There is no point deceiving ourselves: stirring tea does not make it sweeter. For decades, healthcare has been subject to savings and cuts. We constantly hear that healthcare does not need additional funding, only better management. It is impossible to manage rationally a system that is so severely short of money. This was one of the fundamental demands of the hunger strike organized by the Porozumienie Rezydentów, in which I took part in 2017: significantly greater spending on healthcare. It has still not been fulfilled.

According to Polish people, the biggest problem facing public healthcare is the queues for specialists. Does the Left have a plan for dealing with this?

Kaja Filaczyńska: Yes. The first issue is that specialist doctors should be focused on treatment, not administrative work. There are too few of them in Poland, and their time is valuable. The state pays them reasonably well, and then makes them spend hours on paperwork. People without medical training should be hired for administrative work; medical education is not needed for it at all. The Polish system economizes heavily on non-medical staff: clinics lack receptionists, hospitals lack orderlies, there are no care assistants, and doctors have no assistants. This is a mistake.

The second issue is greater powers and funding for family medicine. Today, a family doctor can order more tests than in the past, but has too small a budget and waits too long for test results. Today, a patient comes in with a swollen leg, and the family doctor can order an X-ray or an ultrasound, but the result takes two weeks, so they refer the person to the emergency department and an orthopedist because it is faster and safer. This wastes everyone’s time—the patient, who has to go from the clinic to the emergency department, the primary-care doctor and the orthopedist with a painful leg, as well as the receptionists. We should simply have well-equipped primary-care offices, with quick access to tests, nursing consultations, psychologists and dietitians. And care coordinators who will help people navigate the system and arrange an appointment.

The third issue is more places in specialist training programs. This will of course produce results only in a few years, but the truth is that Poland simply has too few specialist doctors.

You are a doctor politically engaged in public affairs—in 2020, before the Constitutional Tribunal announced its ruling on abortion, you collected the signatures of more than a thousand doctors opposing the new regulations. Do you believe doctors should engage in political disputes?

Kaja Filaczyńska: If politics barges into the health and lives of their patients—absolutely. The abortion ban simply harms women and creates a direct threat to them. Healthcare should not be a battleground for ideological warfare; a doctor’s role is not moral judgment or evangelization. We are meant to treat and alleviate suffering, not cause it. Taking away women’s right to abortion, especially in cases of fetal abnormalities, causes suffering—it leads to depression, anxiety disorders and sometimes even post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. We already know that Polish law threatens women’s lives, as happened in the cases of Izabela from Pszczyna and Dorota from Nowy Targ. For me, the matter is clear: the state is now ordering doctors to violate the Code of Medical Ethics, and a clear, strong voice is needed to say that the medical community does not consent to this.

Kaja Filaczyńska—an endocrinologist and obesity-treatment specialist. She has been active in the Razem party since 2015. In 2017, she actively participated in the protests organized by Porozumienie Rezydentów, which demanded higher wages for young doctors and greater funding for healthcare. In 2021, she was part of the Medycy na Granicy initiative, which provided humanitarian aid to people staying at the Polish-Belarusian border. She is running for the Sejm in constituency 1 (Legnica – Jelenia Góra), in third place on the KW Lewica list.

Material financed by KW NOWA LEWICA