A month after merging the district’s health centres — from eleven down to six —, the Ungheni District Council, as their founder, is rebuilding their governing boards and calling on doctors who have left the country, as well as people from the community, to take a seat on them. The call, published on 14 July by the Ungheni Health Centre, is for a post that carries real weight — and comes with an unusual condition: it is unpaid.
Who can apply, and by when
It is, in fact, a single seat on each board — that of “member-representative of the community/diaspora” — for which two different categories of people may apply, under different conditions. As a diaspora representative, the call asks for a “doctor working in a medical or medical-research institution, or in a medical academic setting abroad” — that is, an Ungheni native or a Moldovan settled outside the country who works in the medical field. As a community representative, higher education is required, while skills and experience in the medical, legal or economic field are an advantage; community leaders, representatives of patient associations, of civil society, of academia or of the town hall may apply.
A CV and a letter of motivation are submitted, stating the centre the candidate is applying for. At the Ungheni Health Centre, the file is left in person, at 27 Romană Street, fifth floor, office 503; the District Council’s notice also gives the e-mail address consiliul.raional-ungheni@apl.gov.md.
The deadline differs by source and by centre: the call on the Ungheni Health Centre’s website gives 24 July 2026, while the District Council’s notice, valid for all six centres, gives 27 July 2026. Anyone wishing to apply would do well to check the date with the centre concerned. The six centres founded by the District Council are those left after the merger: Ungheni, Sculeni, Pîrlița, Măcărești-Costuleni, “Natalia Munteanu” (Cornești) and Dănuțeni.
What a board member actually decides
The seat is not decorative. According to the call, the governing board approves the institution’s development strategy, examines the estimate of income and expenditure — the business plan — and its amendments, approves the annual plans and activity reports, approves the procurement plans and checks the transparency of public-procurement procedures, examines the organisational chart and staffing, approves employees’ pay-scale lists and reviews the reports of the Court of Accounts, the Financial Inspection, the National Health Insurance Company and the National Council for Evaluation and Accreditation in Health. These are, in other words, the levers by which a health centre is run. Everything is approved by vote, in session, and the diaspora representative is not a mere observer: they vote, just like the other members — only the board secretary has no vote.
With one point the call states emphatically: “Membership of the Board of Administration provides for no financial remuneration and is carried out on a voluntary basis.”
Why the diaspora, and why now
The seat reserved for the diaspora is not the district’s idea. It stems from how the governing board of a health centre is composed: the framework regulation approved by Order no. 436 of the Ministry of Health, in force since 1 July, reserves in each board — alongside the seats of the founder and of the staff — one seat for a “community/diaspora representative”: five voting members on the district centre’s board, three on those of the rural centres. The mechanism is not new: in 2023 the Ministry of Health invited the diaspora onto the boards of 36 medical-sanitary institutions across the country, among them Ungheni District Hospital, and by order appointed diaspora representatives to the boards of the institutions it founds itself, district hospitals among them.
What is new now is the timing. The call comes shortly after the vote of 18 June, by which the District Council merged the eleven health centres into six — a decision contested in the very session in which it was taken. Once consolidated, the centres are reconstituting their governing boards, and the founder has the community and diaspora seats to fill.
The result is a door opened to the expertise of doctors who have left the country, at exactly the level where a health centre’s strategy, money and procurement are decided. But who walks through it comes down to one thing: being unpaid work, it all depends on how many diaspora doctors are willing to put their time on the line for the health centre back home.