Prof. Dawid Murawa resigned as director of Szpital Wojewodzki w Poznaniu, the Wielkopolska Provincial Hospital in western Poland, at a press conference on Friday 30 October 2026. He had held the post since February 2025, is serving a one month notice period and leaves in December 2026. He was not dismissed, and in none of his quoted remarks did he mention the hospital’s RFID surgical instrument tracking system.
The system came up anyway, from the other side of the argument. Marek Wozniak, Marshal of the Wielkopolska region and head of the regional government that owns the hospital, was asked why the hospital had been inspected so often during Murawa’s tenure. He said the inspections were needed because of signals of possible irregularities in public procurement and because of problems with the functioning of the surgical instrument tracking system. “To jest zupelnie normalne”, he said, or “this is completely normal”. The remarks were reported by the Polish health portal abcZdrowie on 31 October 2026.
That is the new line, and it is worth stating precisely. The body that paid for the system, and that owns the hospital running it, has publicly named it as one of its grounds for inspection. Nobody has said it caused the director to leave.
What the tracking system is
Poznan Provincial Hospital fitted RFID tags to its surgical instruments in November 2025, the first hospital in Poland to track its surgical inventory that way. The supplier was Caretag, a Danish company selling a UHF RFID platform and durable high temperature tags for instrument tracking and sterile processing. UHF is the long range passive flavour, working in Europe around 865 to 868 MHz, where a reader identifies many tags at once at a distance and so counts a whole tray. The system cost 3 million zloty, funded in full by the Marshal’s Office, and covered roughly 12,500 instruments by August 2026.
As we reported in September 2026, several hundred tags were damaged in the first nine months. Theatre staff told Gazeta Wyborcza that chips had come away from instruments during use and during sterilisation, and that some had been lost in patients’ wounds. Radio Poznan reported on 11 August 2026 that the cause lay in the excessively rapid heating of instruments during sterilisation, a ramp rate problem rather than a radio one. The hospital said that month that the heating issue had been resolved and that it would extend the system to further departments. Officials from the Marshal’s Office had already run two audits of the marking programme by April 2026 and found a series of irregularities, and a deputy director lost her job over it.
Rynek Zdrowia, reporting the resignation on 30 October 2026, repeated that tags were coming off surgical instruments, including during operations. It gave no newer figure for how many have failed since August 2026.
The money, which is a separate argument
The finances dominate every Polish report of the resignation, and none of them connects the losses to the RFID project. The hospital recorded a net loss of 12.2 million zloty by the end of May 2026 and 23.8 million zloty by August 2026, with a further 19 million zloty loss reported in September 2026. In 2024 it closed the year with a net result above 30 million zloty.
Murawa blames the Narodowy Fundusz Zdrowia, the single national health fund that pays for publicly funded treatment in Poland. On 20 October 2026 he said the NFZ had not paid roughly 19 million zloty for work done above contracted limits, and that with it the hospital would be about 15 million zloty in surplus. Rafal Stachlewski, the NFZ’s spokesman in Wielkopolska, disputed the figures and accused him of “zonglowanie danymi”, juggling data. Planned operations in general surgery, gynaecology and orthopaedics were suspended for about a month from mid October 2026.
On why he is going, Murawa said: “Mam wrazenie, ze moja osoba tu komus przeszkadza”, that he has the impression his presence is bothering someone, adding that unfortunately it would be the owner of the hospital. He said there had been more inspections during his tenure than in the previous ten years. Gazeta Wyborcza’s sources said he left because he did not want to risk being dismissed.
What is still unanswered
Three questions matter to anyone running an instrument level tracking programme, and none has been answered publicly: whether the inspections have reported and what they found; whether the rollout is continuing, paused or being extended as planned; and who owns the project once Murawa leaves, given that no successor has been named.
The governance point outlasts the local politics. A system bought centrally and run locally has become an audit subject for its funder, and its sponsor leaves with the technical questions open. More on hospital asset tracking is in our Healthcare section.
