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Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova: Mr President, allow me to provide a brief overview of the current state of the nation’s healthcare system, the reforms presently underway, and those planned for the 2026–2030 period.

Under your instruction, we are advancing three national projects that pertain directly or indirectly to healthcare.

The principal and most wide-ranging of these is the Long and Active Life national project. Furthermore, within the broader Family national project, we are executing a dedicated federal project focused on maternal and child health. The third, one of our new national projects for technological leadership, is New Health-Saving Technologies. This project addresses the development of novel clinical facilities, as well as new pharmaceuticals and medical devices. Collectively, these projects are central to safeguarding the quality and accessibility of healthcare for the citizens of the Russian Federation.

Immediately prior to the start of 2026, the Government approved the state-guaranteed programme for the provision of free healthcare to citizens. This programme defines the scope of medical care to be delivered across the country’s regions. For 2026, the volume of care funded through compulsory medical insurance is budgeted at 4.8 trillion rubles, representing a 9.6 percent increase on the previous year. This funding ensures the fulfilment of all obligations undertaken by the state and, by extension, the regional authorities. It also enables us to meet the remuneration commitments for healthcare professionals.

In line with your instructions on strengthening primary care, we will commence the second phase of this programme in 2026. This involves opening new facilities and, crucially, recruiting additional medical staff. This remains a complex challenge, as is consistently highlighted in your meetings with regional governors, where you usually request updates on medical staffing levels.

We are doing this work together with the regions, as planned. Perhaps, not everything is working out fine, but we have already obtained certain positive results. One such indirect result implies that the volume of special social payments for the staff of the primary healthcare sector, which are being allocated on your instruction, increased by almost 28 percent throughout 2025. In 2024, such payments totalled 158 billion rubles, and in 2025, they reached 202 billion rubles. This means that numerous specialists are being attracted, many of them are arriving, and this is very good.

We are expecting this trend to continue in 2026 and beyond. Consequently, we are stipulating the required financial resources for this.

This, as well as regional measures and the County Doctor and County Paramedic programmes, are yielding the results that we can now see.

As per your instruction, we continue to modernise the remuneration system in the healthcare sector. We can now safely say that the programme of state guarantees stipulates the mandatory share of salaries in the structure of the payroll fund (50 percent). The regions must fulfil this requirement. They should have converted to this concept some time ago, all of them have done this, but now we have formalised this requirement in the programme of state guarantees.

Certainly, these efforts are producing the desired results, and we can see positive trends in the decline in mortality rates. So far, we have compiled statistics for 2025 alone, Nevertheless, we can see a tangible decrease in deaths from oncological diseases. We also see that TB-related mortality rates have plunged considerably (in effect, we have already defeated TB). The same concerns HIV, AIDS and multiple other infectious diseases being monitored by us all the time.

Vladimir Putin: Ms Golikova, you and I realise that there are no secondary issues in our social policy. But healthcare occupies a special place even among all these high-priority issues.

Let us discuss this in more detail.

Tatyana Golikova: Thank you.

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