Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s centre-left Civic Coalition (KO) party has been hit by a wave of public outrage over the fact that a VIP lounge was set up at an Accident and Emergency (A&E) facility of a Warsaw public hospital and managed by a doctor who was a prominent member of the ruling party and earning €400,000 per year.
The doctor in question, Dawid Kacprzyk, was a local Warsaw councillor and leader of the youth wing of the KO who was appointed to manage A&E at the hospital, although he had only been a qualified doctor for two years and had not completed his specialisation. In the last financial year, he earned €400,000.
Tusk responded to the outrage over the reports in the media by announcing legislation to cap the pay of doctors in the public health service and is reported to be considering the suspension of his party’s structures in Warsaw.
Kacprzyk himself resigned from the party on June 16 but the scandal rolled on with details emerging of what has been happening in Warsaw’s health service.
According to portal Zero the doctor had clocked almost 4,000 hours in one hospital in 2025 averaging 330 hours a month with some shifts lasting continuously for 3-4 days and earned €400,000 in the last financial year and bought a Porsche Panamera car.
Investigations by reporters showed that at the time he was supposed to be on duty he was attending meetings of a municipal council, making TV appearances and being active on social media.
But worse was to follow for the ruling party when it was reported by broadcaster TV Republika that a prominent KO politician, Małgorzata Kidawa-Błońska the speaker of the Senate, the second chamber of Poland’s parliament, had twitch her husband used a “VIP lounge” which Kacprzyk had set up at the Warsaw hospital’s A&E unit.
The VIP room was used to usher in KO notables to avoid having to wait for treatment. The users were seen right away and given the kind of medical treatment unavailable to those having to wait for hours at the unit.
Robert Mazurek, commentator for popular YouTube broadcaster Kanał Zero said that “this is the way elections are lost” and recalled how the last Tusk government (2007-2015) had suffered from its members being illicitly taped enjoying meals at exclusive restaurants at the public expense in 2014.
PM Tusk took action on the issue of doctors’ pay on June 17 by ordering an audit of public funding for the healthcare system to root out fraud and excessive earnings by some medics.
A statement published by the prime minister’s office on Wednesday said that an audit is “essential” to plan next steps and determine whether some doctors in the country “are exploiting the system to obtain unjustified financial benefits”.
Tusk said: “I don’t blame anyone, but the system is broken. For years, it has been increasingly geared toward inflating the salaries of some doctors,” adding that in certain hospitals salary costs absorb almost the entire budget.
The prime minister also said that his administration has adopted a bill that would allow an agency under the country’s health ministry to “effectively control and monitor physicians’ salaries.”
The head of the government moved to extricate his party from the scandal by saying that practices such as those which have been identified and that it was up to all parties to ensure this does not happen in future.
“Connections cannot determine the speed of access to a doctor or hospital. The system requires radical overhaul and shared responsibility across all political spectrums,” he said, adding that cases where laws have been broken will be investigated by prosecutors.
The Warsaw district prosecutor’s office has announced that it has launched preliminary checks into the allegations, adding that such a system “may have exposed other emergency department patients to direct danger of loss of life or serious harm to health”.
Warsaw City KO controlled authorities have ordered their own audit and the hospital at which Kacprzyk worked suspects him of having committed fraud.
Questions however are being asked about how the work of the hospital, which is owned by Warsaw City authority, was so poorly supervised and why Kacprzyk was allowed free reign to use A&E services to offer VIP services to KO politicians.
It is not the first time KO politicians have been accused of using influence to exert preferential treatment in Poland’s public healthcare system.
Senator Tomasz Lenz was forced out of the KO when it emerged that he took his son to a doctor working in an A&E unit without registering at the unit and the son received treatment without having to sit in the waiting room.
In another case a hospital manager “hijacked” an ambulance with equipment to the mother of a local KO MP so that she would not have to wait for treatment.
Such reports have been emerging regularly at a time when cutbacks have been announced with closure of some hospital wards and limits imposed on treatments available in the public health service.
Opposition Conservatives (PiS) are demanding action from the public prosecutors and for Kacprzyk to be made to pay some of the money back if it is confirmed that he did not actually work many of the shifts for which he made claims.
PiS have also accused the KO of deliberately undermining public health care to benefit private providers and of having presided over an unprecedented rise in doctor’s pay without any signs of an increase in productivity or quality of treatment.
