About 9,000 prescriptions on a Ukrainian diploma issued to a woman: how Poland's health ministry licensed a man the medical chambers had refused

Poland is one of Europe's main destinations for doctors trained outside the European Union, and since 2020 the Ministry of Health has been able to grant them a conditional, time-limited right to practise even when the medical self-government has said no. The Supreme Medical Chamber (Naczelna Izba Lekarska, NIL), which keeps the register, has long argued that this parallel route is unsafe. In February 2025 a television investigation gave it a textbook example.

According to Gazeta Lekarska, reporting on 20 February 2025, a reporter for the TVN programme Uwaga! bought fentanyl on a prescription obtained through a website without any medical records, using the personal details of the health minister, Izabela Leszczyna. The prescriber was a man who had shown the ministry a Ukrainian diploma which, the programme found, the university had issued to a different person, a woman. The district medical chambers had refused him a conditional licence because he did not meet the required standards; he then applied to the ministry, which granted it. NIL spokesman Jakub Kosikowski wrote on X that the man had never completed medical studies and had issued about 9,000 prescriptions. Prosecutors were examining the case.

Kresy.pl reported, citing the NIL statement, that the Łódź district chamber had opened proceedings before its professional-liability officer, that it had warned the ministry months before the licence was withdrawn, and that the clinic where the man was supposedly working under supervision had never employed him. At a briefing on 21 February, Gazeta Lekarska reported, NIL president Łukasz Jankowski said about 200 people were practising in Poland on conditional licences, working as doctors but not subject to professional liability. The same day the Presidium of the Supreme Medical Council demanded repeal of the simplified routes and a ministry check of every consent already granted, by verifying the diplomas submitted. On 25 February Gazeta Lekarska reported that the minister had agreed to return to the pre-2020 rules, under which the self-government alone decided who could practise.

The failure was structural. One body checked and refused; the other accepted a declaration of Polish-language ability and papers whose authenticity, by NIL's account, nobody checked, and its consent put the holder beyond the chambers' disciplinary reach. NIL asked the ministry to block the declaration-only route and to audit every doctor licensed over a chamber's refusal.

The lesson runs both ways. A degree from a real university can be forged and a licence issued on the forgery, so a ministry decision alone is not proof: check the practitioner in the chambers' central register and ask which body granted the right to practise. And a graduate seeking work abroad should go only through the regulator, keeping originals; anyone selling a way around a chamber's refusal is selling exactly what this case exposed.