Polish ruling coalition shaken after 28-year-old doctor-councillor earned 1.6 mln PLN logging 3976 hours in one hospital
Investigations reveal Dawid Kacprzyk, a Civic Coalition councillor and junior doctor, worked 331 hours a month in Warsaw’s Southern Hospital while appearing at political events during shifts. The scandal has triggered audits, a party resignation, and opposition proposals for systemic change.
The Kacprzyk revelations
Dawid Kacprzyk is a 28-year-old anaesthesiology trainee who, until Monday, sat as a Civic Coalition (KO) councillor for Warsaw’s Ursus district. He also served as coordinator of the emergency department (SOR) at the municipally owned Southern Hospital. Portal Zero established that in 2025 Kacprzyk logged 3976 working hours at that single facility – an average of 331 hours per month. Rosters showed stretches of uninterrupted duty lasting three or even four days. For those services the hospital paid him roughly 1.6 million PLN, while the institution itself closed the financial year with a loss of approximately 1 million PLN.
How is it possible that this man, this pseudo-doctor, exploited the system, ripped the state off, and took more than 1.6 million PLN out of patients’ pockets – as his asset declaration shows. This is pure theft.
Journalists also documented occasions when Kacprzyk was rostered on duty yet appeared publicly – among them on TVP3 Warszawa, at meetings with politicians, and at a district council session.
Political fire and inspections
On Monday PiS MP Paweł Jabłoński filed a prosecutor’s notification, arguing that public money must be spent honestly and that a doctor should be paid only for time genuinely available to patients. That evening KO’s general secretary Marcin Kierwiński announced that Kacprzyk had resigned from the party.
On Tuesday PiS MPs Łukasz Kmita and Anna Kwiecień conducted a parliamentary inspection at the hospital. Kmita called Kacprzyk “a politician in a white coat” and tied his rapid ascent to his party connections, noting the young doctor had been head of Nowa Generacja – the youth wing of Donald Tusk’s party – for three years.
This is not a coincidence; it’s their mechanism. PO is a party of elites, of cliques, of milking the Polish state.
The former prime minister stressed that the overwhelming majority of medics are honest and lose reputationally because of such cases.
The opposition’s five-point reform plan
Morawiecki presented a “PiS prescription” with five elements. First, a central job portal for all medical vacancies to be operational by 1 October 2026 to ensure competition. Second, full transparency: contracts of everyone receiving public funds would be submitted to the Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Tariffs (AOTMiT). Third, a dedicated portal to register and verify all on-call duties, including remote and telephone shifts, by 1 July 2027 at the latest. Fourth, a cap on per-shift pay set at five times the minimum wage. Fifth, a push to increase medical personnel numbers and eliminate pay peaks.
Fair work – good pay. But end the pathology. Transparency. Control. Zero tolerance for milking the state.
Government response and audits
Prime Minister Donald Tusk, speaking before Tuesday’s cabinet meeting, announced the government would adopt a bill enabling AOTMiT to collect information on doctors’ earnings. Warsaw’s mayor Rafał Trzaskowski had already ordered an urgent audit of the Southern Hospital on Monday and later extended it to all municipal SORs.
Health care is too serious a matter to leave room for doubts and ambiguities.
Deputy mayor Renata Kaznowska described the 250–330 PLN hourly rate and the 1.6 million PLN annual pay as a scandal. She warned that from 1 July further pay increases were due to kick in and that some directors were already receiving demands to raise rates to 320–340 PLN per hour.
Coalition figures lament the damage
Education minister Barbara Nowacka said the matter was “closed” from the party’s internal perspective but acknowledged the social dimension remained unresolved. Deputy education minister Katarzyna Lubnauer was blunter, saying the affair had wrecked the government’s messaging at a moment when it wanted to talk about restored rail links and other achievements.
All of that is blood in the sand. It went up in smoke because a councillor has a Porsche Panamera.
- Warsaw mayor orders urgent audit; PiS MP files prosecutor notification; Kacprzyk resigns from Civic Coalition.
- PiS conducts hospital inspection; Mateusz Morawiecki presents 5-point reform plan; PM Tusk announces bill to track doctor earnings.
Systemic cracks in emergency care
The case casts light on deeper strains inside Poland’s emergency departments. With 3.96 physicians per 1000 residents and a trend that reversed physician emigration after 2021 thanks to statutory annual raises, SORs still struggle because patients use them as substitutes for overbooked specialist clinics and underperforming primary care. The chairman of the Residents’ Alliance, Sebastian Goncerz, stressed that the Kacprzyk situation is “completely non-standard” and that the country’s 33 000 specialising doctors do not earn such sums. Two factors converged here, he said: an extremely favourable contract and an extraordinary number of hours.
