ABSTRACT
This article aims to analyse the implementation of public procurement procedures in the context of national governments' fight against the COVID-19 pandemic and find solutions for adapting those public procurement procedures that are currently used in the healthcare sector to new challenges. For this above purpose, we have applied both theoretical methods such as analysis, synthesis, generalization, and empirical methods such as observation, etc. The research has yielded the following findings: 1) there are no one-size-fits-all solutions in the national governments' fight against the COVID-19 pandemic through the public procurement mechanism, except that national policies in this field intend to speed up the organisation of the public procurement procedures, which would shorten the time for the delivery of medical goods to healthcare facilities; 2) due to the current emergency conditions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, public procurements of medical supplies are taking place under the non-competitive procedure, i. e. with direct contracting of a specific vendor, which essentially increases corruption risks and allows for subjective decision making; 3) amid the increased corruption risks, there is a need to assign high priority to strengthening the public control (monitoring), as well as the governmental control over medical procurements; 4) saving of public funds as the underlying principle of some national public procurement systems becomes irrelevant in the face of such threats as the global COVID-19 pandemic; 5) it is quite difficult to speak of another principle - effective use of public funds - because we are now dealing with an emergency and the actors (both the government and the expert community) lack understanding of how things might potentially develop in the future. Thus, the authors offer the following solutions: 1) create temporary specialized bodies, with the cross-agency powers, at the national and regional levels, that would take on such functions as: coordination of procurements; needs analysis of particular areas in medical supplies; management of potential vendors. These measures may help make medical procurements as effective as possible in these current conditions; 2) develop special procedures (mechanisms), by national governments, for conducting checks of public procurements in the healthcare sector that are made as part of the response measures against the COVID-19 pandemic, because those check algorithms that are in place today cannot take into account the realities of this particular emergency situation and the conditions in which those procurements are made.
