South Bohemia, Lower Austria plan health care cooperation

Michala will remember the bloody scene for the rest of her life. In May 2004, she was just a few weeks away from delivery. It was dark and she was falling asleep, when suddenly she could feel blood oozing from her body. It flowed from her placenta which the child inside her needed so badly. „My life was at risk,“ says the 36-year-old woman in her kitchen in České Velenice. It all ended well, but it was quite dramatic. Instead of being taken to the nearest hospital located only a few hundred meters away, she had to wait a long 20 minutes for the ambulance which then took her to a hospital in České Budějovice. The hospital to which Michala would have made it in only a few minutes is in Gmünd, Austria, and it is therefore available to Czech patients only exceptionally. But the situation may change after many years now. Lower Austria and South Bohemia have started negotiating new rules which would allow hospitals in both regions to accept patients according to new rules. Instead of the patients' homeland, the key factors will be their choice and distance.

Smuggling drugs

„Before the Czech Republic joined Schengen, our ambulance was not even permitted to cross the border,“ says Karl Binder, the economic director at the Gmünd hospital. "We haven't been told yet whether we can turn on the beacon in the Czech Republic or whether the medication…