A new five-year Serving People, Improving Health Project, backed by the World Bank, will develop medical infrastructure and improve the quality of health services in eight regions across the country – Dnipropetrovsk, Lviv, Poltava, Rivne, Vinnytsia, Volyn, Zakarpattya, and Zaporizhya.

The project will deal with health financing, the development of medical infrastructure, e-health/information systems, and public outreach to prevent cardiovascular diseases and cancer. There will also be a small implementation component, with project management and monitoring evaluation.

Ukrainian health minister Alexander Kvitashvili said the project would be the ‘driving force’ for the reform that would build the foundation for fundamental improvements in 2015.

‘I am personally grateful to Qimiao Fan [the bank’s country director for Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine] for it proved possible in [a] short time to prepare the necessary documents to obtain the final decision on the project by the Board of Directors of the bank and we are looking forward to its start so that the population of Ukraine [can] feel the real effect of its implementation,’ he said.

Fan said: ‘This new investment will help improve the quality and availability of health services to millions of Ukrainians in selected regions, and contribute to more efficient use of resources in the healthcare system.’