Experts: Latvia Needs a Single Plan to Keep Healthcare and Medicine Supply Running in a Crisis
At a conference in Rēzekne, experts concluded that crisis preparedness cannot rest on separate institutional plans, and urged the state to draw up a unified resilience plan for healthcare and medicine supply. Estonian and Ukrainian experience was presented.
Latvian and foreign experts said at the international conference “First Line of Defence. Healthcare and Pharmacy in National Resilience”, held on 15 October at the GORS Latgale Embassy in Rēzekne, that Latvia needs a single plan so that patient treatment and medicine supply do not stop in an emergency. They stressed that internal plans and drug stockpiles of individual institutions or companies are not enough. The whole system must be coordinated, including patient care, the work of hospitals and pharmacies during power and communications outages, drug production and delivery, and information exchange.
Call for state leadership
Signe Jantone, executive director of the Latvian Association of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, said the sector broadly accepts that healthcare resilience is part of national defence, but awareness alone is insufficient. In her view the state must take the lead and build dialogue with the sector to produce a single action algorithm covering medical institutions, laboratories, the emergency medical service, hospitals, family doctors, drug manufacturers, suppliers and patient organisations. Resilience also means the ability to produce medicines and deliver them to patients.
Colonel Arvis Zīle, head of the State Chancellery's Crisis Management Centre, noted that healthcare depends on electricity, mobile communications, water, fuel and payment systems. Priorities should be set before a crisis, and generator and fuel supply to hospitals and pharmacies should be coordinated. He also stressed joint exercises held without electricity and communications.
Ukrainian and Estonian experience
Andrii Metelskyi, head of the Ukrainian subsidiary of Latvian drug maker AS Olpha, cited Ukrainian Health Ministry data: as of 1 September 2026, 2,687 healthcare infrastructure objects in 854 institutions were damaged or destroyed. He urged avoiding the concentration of stocks in one or two warehouses and holding raw materials for at least 3–6 months in state reserves.
Ando Leppiman, head of Estonia's Strategic Reserves Agency, said wholesalers there hold a one-month supply of about 200 medicines, with the state paying for the service. The state provides generators to critical pharmacies, and 110 crisis-adapted shops are planned by the end of 2026.
Memorandum
At the conference, Liene Cipule, director of the Emergency Medical Service, and Māris Rēvalds, chairman of the board of the Healthcare Employers' Association, signed a memorandum on mapping private medical institutions' resources for the disaster medicine system.
