9. Professional Status of Physicians in the Russian Federation

The problem of medical doctors (MDs) as a professional group has become acute since the mid-2000s when Russia began to implement “The Health” (2006–2011), a national priority project which aimed to improve the quality and accessibility of primary health care for its population. Official governmental reports regarding the implementation of the national project “Health” focus only on the material component of the reform process, namely the quantity of purchased equipment and the amount of funding spent. Until now, there has been little assessment of the sociopolitical processes involved in reforming the health care system and little understanding of whether the socioeconomic status and prestige of the medical profession have improved. This chapter seeks to fill that gap. The empirical data reported in this chapter is based on national statistics on health care reform (1995–2011) and several mass surveys of Russian physicians and the population, namely the Russian longitude monitoring survey (RLMS-HSE, HSE, 2005–2011, N = 12641), and “The prestige of the medical profession in Russian society” (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, HSE, 2011, N = 120). The results show that the rhetoric of neoliberal reforms in the Russian system of public health care includes the professional group of doctors as a social institute in the regulation processes. In practice we observe the rather weak tendencies of medical professionalization.