How to find a good doctor in Bulgaria and not die?

Go to the first specialist you come across? Listen to what friends recommend? Use some other criteria?

If there are alarming symptoms, there is no time to look for a doctor – all that is left is to trust to fate and ask for recommendations from your insurance company (for holders of a long-term residence permit) or from your personal doctor (for those who already have a permanent residence permit or EU long-term resident status). After that, you can only hope for luck. As in other countries, Bulgaria has good doctors and not so good ones. Since salaries here are lower than in other EU countries, many medical professionals leave for Germany and other countries where the work pays better. Those who remain in Bulgaria are the ones who, for one reason or another, could not or did not want to leave. The reasons can vary, and they are by no means necessarily a lack of professionalism or competence. Even so, there is a certain shortage of doctors in the country, which means that finding a good one is difficult.

For this reason it is better to start looking in advance. What can you go by?

• Recommendations from friends. The most popular way to find the specialist you need. Unfortunately, different people may have completely different criteria – for some, attentiveness and knowledge of Russian matter more than professionalism and a properly chosen course of treatment, some look primarily at the cost, and for others some entirely different features are decisive. So it is worth finding out exactly what your friends liked and what they were going by.
• Reviews on Bulgarian websites and forums, and in Bulgarian groups on social media. The most useful from this point of view are Bulgarian mothers’ groups – they usually have plenty of information about doctors, both for adults and for children. Genuine reviews can also be found on aggregator sites, for example Superdoc.bg.
• Official information. Clinic websites will tell you where the doctors trained and what training they received.
• Your own impressions. Sometimes the reviews of a doctor are good and their education is excellent, but there is a certain incompatibility, a reluctance to turn to that doctor for help. In that case it is better to look for another specialist: if the patient does not trust the doctor, the treatment will do no good.

When looking for a doctor, you need to consider whether they work with your insurance company (if you have a long-term residence permit and the health situation is an insured event) or with the НЗОК (relevant for permanent residents of Bulgaria). If not, you will have to pay for treatment out of your own pocket. Sometimes that is a reasonable solution if the specialist really is a good one, but more often a doctor’s professionalism has nothing to do with which insurance companies they work with.

You have your permanent residence permit / EU long-term resident status. How do you get medical care now?

Health insurance in Bulgaria

Health insurance