Poland Revives Military Medical School to Fix Defence Healthcare Crisis

Closing the Gap in Military Medicine
The numbers behind this decision are hard to ignore. Staffing shortages in Poland's military health service are estimated to fall somewhere between 40 and 60 percent, with the most critical gaps in trauma surgery, anesthesiology, intensive care, and emergency medicine. The military health service currently operates with around 880 personnel, but experts say it needs at least 1,600 to function effectively in a conflict scenario.

The government has set aside around 400 million złoty — roughly 94 million euros — to get the academy off the ground. Once fully operational, it is expected to accommodate up to 1,200 students and produce several hundred graduates annually. The original Łódź Military Medical Academy was dissolved in 2002, when it was folded into a civilian university to form the Medical University of Łódź. Since then, military medical training has been scattered and inconsistent. This new institution aims to bring it all back under one roof.

Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz was direct about what prompted the urgency. The war in Ukraine, he said, has made it impossible to ignore how vital battlefield medicine really is. "Battlefield medicine and the experience of Ukraine mean that we must invest in building up military medical forces and the military health service," he stated, adding that more doctors, nurses, and paramedics are needed — both to support soldiers in wartime and to serve civilians in peacetime. He also laid out a broader vision: establishing a military hospital in every province across the country, though that goal will require significant expansion of trained personnel and closer coordination with the interior ministry.

A Military Built for Combat, Not for Care
Poland has been on one of the fastest defence spending trajectories in Europe since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It now allocates the largest share of GDP to defence among all 32 NATO member states — a remarkable shift for a country that once sat at the quieter edges of alliance politics. But that investment has been lopsided.

A study published last year by Warsaw's Military Medical Institute found that nearly 40 percent of doctors lack sufficient training to operate effectively under wartime conditions. General Grzegorz Gielerak, director of the Military Institute of Medicine in Warsaw, put it bluntly: "We have lost the balance between what a soldier fights with and what gives them a chance of survival when they are wounded."

He went further, arguing that medical support has been consistently undervalued in the country's defence strategy. "We invest billions in combat systems, but medical support is still treated as a cost, not as a strategic condition for the effectiveness of all other defence investments," he said. His warning was stark but clear — the pieces exist, but they have not been assembled into anything coherent yet. "We have individual bricks, but we do not yet have a wall, and the time we have to build it is not unlimited."