The health and social services reform will become reality at the beginning of 2023, and we began to prepare for its implementation immediately after the legislation was adopted in summer 2021.

On June 23, 2021 Parliament approved the Government bill proposing legislation establishing the wellbeing services counties and enacting the national reform of health care, social services and rescue services. Generally referred to as the ‘health and social services reform’, this legislation will enter into force by stages between July 1, 2021 and January 1, 2023. 

After the reform, ownership of HUS will be shared by four wellbeing services counties to be established in Uusimaa and by the City of Helsinki. The guiding principle is to achieve uniform conduct across the entire region of Uusimaa, guaranteeing equal access to specialized medical care for all residents. 

HUS born again in the health and social services reform

With the health and social services reform, HUS will be re-established. On September 27, 2021, the HUS Executive Board appointed a statutory temporary HUS preparation group to plan for the setting up of the new Joint Authority HUS. Its chairman is City Manager Sami Sarvilinna from the City of Helsinki. HUS is represented in the preparation group by CAO Lauri Tanner and project leader Teppo Heikkilä, who is the expert secretary. 

The temporary HUS preparation group is to prepare the proposal for a new Charter for Joint Authority HUS. This will define the organization and administration of Joint Authority HUS, the composition of its Executive Board, the structure of its ownership steering and its funding model. 

The Charter will also determine the university connection of the hospital and cooperation with the university. By law, the preparation group must also draft the Administrative Regulations for HUS. Preparations for the HUS agreement on the organization of services between Joint Authority HUS, the wellbeing services counties of Uusimaa and the City of Helsinki, which will specify cooperation and division of duties between the parties, began in late December.

The organisation will be updated to serve the aims of the reformation

For the HUS organization to serve the new wellbeing services counties in the best possible way, the HUS Executive Board decided that a reorganization is required. On August 16, 2021, the HUS Executive Board outlined the goals for updating the organization, derived from the Act on Organising Social Welfare and Healthcare: 

  • achieving equality 
  • securing locally accessible services
  • supporting good interaction between Joint Authority HUS, the wellbeing services counties, the City of Helsinki, and the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Helsinki 
  • establishing coordinated service packages 
  • providing services cost-effectively and efficiently 

We established the Regional Clinical Services profit area on June 1, 2021 to support this aim and to contribute to the structural reform towards a departmental service model.

The functions transferred to the new profit area in 2021 were Emergency Medicine and Services, Children and Adolescents, and Psychiatry. 

In autumn 2021, we prepared for the next stage of the transfer, involving Perioperative, Intensive Care and Pain Medicine; Gynecology and Obstetrics; the Neurocenter; the Head and Neck Center; and the Comprehensive Cancer Center. At the same time, Psychiatry and the Neurocenter merged into a new department, the Brain Center. This transfer was enacted on January 1, 2022.

Because hospital areas will be abolished at the beginning of 2023, we appointed working groups to plan for the organizing of HUS regional services in addition to planning for the transfer of clinical departments. These working groups began their work in January 2022. 

We have kept our employees up to date on the progress of administrative changes at briefings and meetings and in the intranet.