Five villages in Ungheni district are losing their health centre as a standalone institution. The district council approved the plan on 18 June, at an extraordinary sitting — with 18 votes in favour, none against and 11 abstentions. It was the only contested vote in a sitting where all the other 18 votes passed unanimously.
Decision 4/11 approves the “Plan for the reorganisation of the Public Medical-Sanitary Institutions Health Centres of Ungheni district”. Of the 11 existing centres, 6 remain, and the other five — Mănoilești, Valea Mare, Cetireni, Rădenii Vechi and Petrești — are folded into them.
Who absorbs whom
| The centre that remains | What it absorbs | People on the lists |
|---|---|---|
| Ungheni | Mănoilești (2,686) · Valea Mare (4,145) · Cetireni (3,018) | 45,636 |
| Pîrlița | Rădenii Vechi (2,138) | 14,008 |
| Sculeni | Petrești (4,099) | 11,798 |
| Cornești | — | 10,614 |
| Dănuțeni | — | 7,927 |
| Măcărești-Costuleni | — | 7,313 |
The arithmetic behind it: the council did not choose
The plan looks like a local decision. In substance it is the mechanical application of a national rule.
A Ministry of Health order from May 2026 lowers the threshold at which a health centre keeps its autonomy: from 7,500 people on family doctors’ lists and 4 doctors, to 6,000 people and 3 doctors. It takes effect on 1 July 2026.
Now look at the table again: the six centres that survive are exactly those with more than 6,000 people on their lists. The five that disappear are exactly those below 6,000. There is no exception, in either direction.
One detail says a great deal: Măcărești-Costuleni has 7,313 people on its lists — below the old threshold of 7,500, above the new one of 6,000. The relaxation from Chișinău is precisely what saved it. At the same sitting, the council appointed it a new head, for five years.
The ministry also supplies the figures that explain why the reform is happening: across the country there are some 1,600 family doctors, of whom nearly 400 are over 65, and the system needs 260 more. In other words, there are not enough doctors to staff 240 autonomous centres.
What the decision does not say
Here is the part that ought to worry.
We read the act in full. It contains no provision on staff, buildings, working hours, transfer of assets, an entry-into-force date or costs. It nowhere uses the words “closure” or “liquidation” — but neither does it say “family doctors’ office”. The annex is a table of who goes into whom, and that is all.
In practice, someone in Mănoilești cannot learn from the decision of their own elected councillors whether a doctor will remain in the village.
The guarantee that one will comes not from the act their councillors voted, but from the rule written in Chișinău: in rural localities of over 1,000 inhabitants a Family Doctors’ Office is set up, staffed by at least one doctor. Below 1,000 — a Health Post, with medical personnel of secondary training, the family doctor “travelling to the localities served, according to a set timetable”. The ministry puts it plainly: the small centres “will continue to operate, they will simply change administration”.
And here a question opens that the decision does not touch at all: the commune of Rădenii Vechi has 934 inhabitants, according to the National Bureau of Statistics’ preliminary data. Below the threshold of 1,000. We do not assert that the village will be left without a doctor — the rule could also be read against the number of people on the lists (2,138). But it is a question to which the council, through its act, gives no answer.
Cetireni: moved further away, not closer
The most instructive part of the sitting is not in the decision but in the minutes.
The option agreed at the working meeting of 15 June was for CS Cetireni to pass to CS Dănuțeni. The head of the Dănuțeni centre “did not object”. She then consulted her staff — and the staff declared themselves against. Three days later, the council voted for something else: Cetireni goes to Ungheni.
The argument put to the chamber was that “the residents of Cetireni do not wish” to be attached to Dănuțeni.
Except that, on the map, the argument does not hold. From Cetireni to Dănuțeni it is 10.3 km. From Cetireni to Ungheni — 13.1 km. Our own calculation, by road. The switch sent the people of Cetireni almost three kilometres further from their centre.
What triggered the change, according to the minutes, was not what patients wanted but the opposition of a body of staff. And the head of the Cetireni centre told the chamber that at the 15 June meeting “it was agreed that the Cetireni Health Centre be integrated into the Dănuțeni Health Centre” — contradicting the version that was voted.
To be fair: the practical difference for a patient is small, because Dănuțeni is effectively on the edge of the town. The stake is not the distance. The stake is who decided, and on what grounds.
Bonuses for the heads it was dissolving
At the same sitting, three items before the vote, the council approved a one-off bonus for the management of nine of the 11 health centres — including four of the five it was about to merge away. The annex does not list CS Sculeni or CS Rădenii Vechi; the council would nonetheless extend the contract of the acting head of Rădenii Vechi two items later.
And immediately after the reorganisation vote, it extended the contract of the head of CS Mănoilești and of the acting head of CS Rădenii Vechi. Two centres just voted for absorption. Both decisions passed 29 votes out of 29.
The explanation is not hypocrisy but interest. Under the old rule, the heads of health centres were selected through a competition, organised by the district council. Under the new one, the competition disappears for the centres that remain autonomous — their heads will be appointed directly by the district president — while the heads of the former centres, now subdivisions, will be appointed by the director of the parent centre. The reorganisation does not move only patients — it moves management posts, and the people who decide who fills them.
That also explains why the staff in Dănuțeni resisted, and why 11 of the 29 councillors present — 38% — refused to back the plan without going so far as to vote against it. The minutes do not name them.
The same stake is described, in Fălești, by the head of a centre that keeps its autonomy: “There will no longer be a competition for the post of head. They will agree among themselves and put the proposals to the district council.”
The lists describe a district that no longer exists
There is one number in the decision’s table worth looking at on its own: 97,296. That is how many people, in total, appear on the family doctors’ lists across the district.
The actual population of Ungheni district on 1 January 2026 is 73,971 — the National Bureau of Statistics’ preliminary figure.
The gap is 23,325 people, or 31.5%. The family doctors’ lists describe a district the size of the one that existed a decade ago. The explanation is simple: the law counts people registered on the lists, and those who have left the country stay registered.
The consequence is less simple. The threshold of 6,000 is measured precisely against the lists. If the lists were cleaned of those who no longer live in the district, more centres still would fall below the threshold — and today’s reform would be only the first round.
A consent the centre heads must sign
The decision requires the heads of all 11 centres to submit, by the next sitting of the district council, their consent to the reorganisation. The date of that sitting has not been announced publicly.
The precedents in other districts show what the reform looks like from the inside. In Drochia, a centre with 2,300 patients on its lists passes to the district centre, nine kilometres away. Its head sums up the mood in a single sentence: “How it was we have seen; how it will be, I do not know.”
Correction — 15 July 2026
In the initial version of this article we wrote that, under the old rule, the heads of rural health centres were appointed without a competition, and under the new one — through a competition. The correct picture is the reverse.
The old rule — Health Ministry Order no. 438/2024 and, before it, Government Decision no. 1016/2016 — provided for the heads of health centres to be appointed through a competition, organised by the district council. The new rule, in force since 1 July 2026, is the one that removes the competition: the heads of the centres that remain autonomous will be appointed directly by the district president, without a competition, while the heads of the absorbed subdivisions will be appointed by the director of the parent centre, through a competition.
The stake described in the article — the reorganisation moves management posts and changes who controls them — stands unchanged; only the direction of the mechanism changes. We corrected the passage after re-verifying the normative acts. This is how we work: we correct our mistakes in the open.
Correction — 16 July 2026
On a fresh check of the annexes to the decisions, we found that the one-off bonus approved at the same sitting covered the management of nine of the 11 health centres, not all of them as we had written: the annex does not list CS Sculeni or CS Rădenii Vechi. We have corrected the figure. We also specified the source of the rule — Order No. 436 of 29 May 2026 of the Ministry of Health — and used the precise term, «votes» rather than «items», for the sitting with 18 unanimous votes. The substance described in the article remains unchanged. We correct our mistakes in public.