"They could not drive us out by force, but they managed it with their stupidity and meanness." Almost the entire directorate of the Health Ministry has decided to resign

The head of the Directorate of Strategic Planning and European Integration has announced her resignation.

By the end of 2019, the head of the Directorate of Strategic Planning and European Integration, Iryna Lytovchenko, who took up this post in early 2018, and part of her team are preparing to resign from the Ministry of Health.

She announced this today, Friday, December 6, herself. According to her, yesterday the ministry's leadership "crossed a line".

"The reason — value and ideological differences that make further work at the Ministry of Health impossible," the head of the directorate said.

In particular, she accused the current ministry leadership of lying. According to her, system administrators of the Health Ministry's website were ordered to remove all mentions of their predecessors — Uliana Suprun's team from the resource, and they supposedly carried out the instruction. Suprun herself stated the same thing yesterday afternoon.

However, in the evening, as Lytovchenko claims, another instruction came in: to publish a rebuttal message on the ministry's official Facebook page — supposedly a technical glitch occurred and all news about Suprun's team disappeared from the website by accident, and now the server has been repaired and everything is working again.

At 21:09, such a post did appear on the agency's page. It stated that information about an order to remove the names of the institution's previous leaders from the official website is fake.

"The Ministry's leadership deeply values the work of Uliana Suprun's team and condemns any provocations aimed at creating the appearance of confrontation between teams that, at different times, have made efforts to ensure an effective healthcare system in Ukraine," — the Health Ministry said, adding that technical work was carried out on the website during the day, so malfunctions could have occurred.

Iryna Lytovchenko called such statements "an outright lie that the entire ministry knows about".

"I warned that if they force me to lie on the ministry's page, I will tell the truth on my own page. In the morning they topped it off with an "official" message about technical work on the website, which was posted with yesterday's date (referring to a news item on the ministry's website dated December 5 — ed.). But the admin panel shows that the message was published after the news we posted on the website during the day," Lytovchenko claims.

According to her, this is not the first attempt "to pin the blame on her subordinates and cover up another of its own screw-ups with 'bad civil servants'.

"For 100 days of the government, we were threatened with audits and inspections, I was harassed by the SBU, thugs threatened us, planted informants among staff, and gave unrealistic and contradictory instructions. Not once did my team refuse to fulfil our duty as civil servants, and we carried out all the most absurd tasks. But entering the country's complex reform with a leadership that thinks only about its own chair instead of supporting and building a team — would be a regrettable suicide," the head of the directorate said.

Lytovchenko also accused the ministry's new leadership of incompetence and unprofessionalism, and said she is leaving the Health Ministry together with part of her team.

Health Minister Zoryana Skaletska has not yet commented on Iryna Lytovchenko's decision. However, with a similar wording about a divergence of values and the absence of a strategic vision in the new political team, the head of the National Health Service, Oleh Petrenko, has already resigned. Then, in an interview with LB.ua, the minister described Petrenko's step as "faint-heartedness".

"Let's analyse what values we are talking about. There are tasks, there are developed documents, there is an agreed budget, which we prepared together with the NHSU and at the NHSU's submission. They set out the plans and deadlines for all stages of the reform. It turns out that first we say that we — are one team and together implement the announced changes, and then at the last moment, at the end of the year, when much is still not done, instead of uniting, rolling up our sleeves before finalising the document (the programme of state medical guarantees, — ed.) and submitting it to the Cabinet, say: 'I — that's it, I'm leaving.' For me, this is faint-heartedness. And a lack of understanding of the real responsibility of a person who headed the NHSU," the Health Minister said.

Earlier, Skaletska dismissed all of her advisers, since, in her words, it is unacceptable for any adviser to be perceived as another minister, and for their personal opinion to be taken as the ministry's position.