Key state authorities, in assessing the course of the COVID-19 epidemic, relied mainly on positive test results, as data on incidence (clinical symptoms) was not collected as of May 2, 2020. At the same time, the Minister of Health's supervision of the provision of complete and reliable data relevant to such an assessment was ineffective. The Minister did not present specific data to the Council of Ministers to justify the introduction of various restrictions, orders and bans, e.g. on the use of forests, beaches, etc. The health ministry spent nearly PLN 54 million on building and maintaining new ICT systems, meanwhile, some of them contained incorrect records on tests, hospitalizations, vaccinations and deaths. In addition, from November 2020 until the end of the audit in July 2023. The Minister of Health did not recruit for the position of Chief Sanitary Inspector, which was crucial for public health management during the COVID-19 epidemic, points out the NIK, which decided to look into the actions taken in the COVID-19 epidemic by key state institutions responsible for public health, including: Minister of Health and Chief Sanitary Inspector. The Chamber undertook the following inspections on its own initiative:
- 1 Operation of the National Patient Registry with COVID-19 (I/22/001/KZD),
- 2 Use of information resources by the Chief Sanitary Inspector to assess sanitary risks in connection with the COVID-19 epidemic (I/22/006/KZD),
- 3 Provision and use of information resources by the Minister of Health to assess the course of the COVID-19 epidemic (I/23/001/KZD).
Minister's weak oversight of IT systems
As of March 2020, health care information systems had limited functionality or were not fully implemented. Data relevant to assessing epidemic risk were scattered across seven different systems, collected at different frequencies and in different forms: electronic and paper. The Health Ministry's response to the situation was: the introduction of electronic reporting for laboratories and the construction of four new systems: Entry Records for Poland (EWP), the National Patient Registry ICT system with COVID-19, the Vaccine Distribution System, and the central electronic registration system for COVID-19 immunization. In the initial phase (at the beginning of March 2020), the EWP system covered only people coming to Poland, then it began to collect information on all people in the country.
The NIK audit found a number of deficiencies and errors in the recorded data, especially in the case of names, GTINs and batch numbers of COVID-19 vaccines. Errors in vaccine names occurred in more than 1.6 million cases, GTINs in about 70,000, and batch numbers in about 557,000 cases in the set of vaccinations registered in the system (about 58 million entries as of June 15, 2023). Significantly, only those entries that could not be assigned to any dictionary entry for the names and numbers above were considered erroneous after digital analysis. Thus, an interpretation of the data favorable to the Minister of Health was applied. There was also unreliable information regarding, for example, inoculati...
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