There is no tendency to subordinate the interest of citizens or go against their interest. The people simply expressed their concerns that the decision-makers probably hadn’t taken into consideration or hadn’t explored in detail. Now this ruckus served as another opportunity to raise the issue on the closure of the maternity hospital in Yeghvard. This is what governor of Kotayk Province Romanos Petrosyan told reporters today.

“The plenipotentiary body of the sector is the Ministry of Healthcare which forms the budget and develops a policy, and the governor of the particular province introduces the policy in the province and manages medical institutions subordinate to the province such as Nairi Medical Center. We hadn’t received a decision on terminating state funding for the maternity ward of Nairi Medical Center. Our colleagues at the ministry had simply told us that they were drafting this policy for implementation based on the facts that the minister had already reported,” the governor said.

Petrosyan said on January 8 he had sent an official letter to Minister of Healthcare Arsen Torosyan to revisit the decision on dissolving several maternity hospitals in Armenia’s provinces. “I expressed my concerns and presented the facts and told him that the maternity hospital of the medical center in Yeghvard is different from other maternity hospitals in the sense that, compared with 2018, in 2019, there was a growth of births.”

Romanos Petrosyan personally thinks the maternity hospital in Yeghvard needs to operate and be re-equipped with new equipment and be renovated.

“The maternity hospital will remain open. Currently, we state that the maternity hospital needs to record 150 births. In two to three days, the government will be presented with all the arguments that the governors of other provinces and I made. I hope we solve the issue related to the maternity hospital in Yeghvard.”