STATE SOCIAL POLICY: PERIODIZATION OF HEALTHCARE REFORMS IN THE POST-SOVIET PERIOD

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the new government initiated reforms, including those in thehealthcare system, aimed at the transition to market relations. Today, after several decades, it is time to summarize theresults of the state social policy. The method of periodization is widely used in historical science as one of the summarymethods. The presented research novelty is determined by the insufficient number of articles dealing with the issues ofthe periodization of the post-Soviet healthcare reforms: most articles address this issue indirectly and/or investigateparticular reforms. The main stages of reforms presented in this study are the result of the systematic approach. Todetermine these stages, the article considers the main healthcare system problems, mechanisms to address them, thefrequency of references, and the dates of the beginning of the reform implementation. The main sources of the researchwere official documents and the speeches of the Russian President. The research used the comparative and chronologicalmethods, the content analysis, and the structural approach. As a result, two stages of reforms were identified: 1) thetransitional stage from the collapse of the USSR to 2005 (new principles of healthcare functioning were formulated, butchanges during this stage were poorly controlled and, therefore, were ineffective); 2) the stage of systemic transformationsfrom 2005 to the present day (consistent implementation of previously formulated principles). The latter can be further divided into three sub-periods: 1) from 2005 to 2013 – technical re-equipment of medical facilities; 2) from 2013 to 2020 – optimization of financial, material, and human resources; 3) from 2020 – primary care modernization (suspended by the coronavirus pandemic).

history of healthcare, history of medicine, healthcare reforms, periodizations