The Task Had an End. The Year Did Not.

We take Evis Sala at her word about why she is leaving. The record of why she should have is the harder document.

Editorial Board

At 14:37 on Wednesday, before most of the country knew there had been a cabinet meeting, the Minister of Health and Social Welfare announced that it had been her last. She had accepted, she wrote, “some important international engagements in my field of expertise: oncology, artificial intelligence, innovation.” One year earlier she had taken on the ministry “with great responsibility,” in “a field full of challenges and difficulties.” She thanked the Prime Minister for his trust. She thanked every doctor, nurse and worker in the system. She thanked, in a separate sentence, “every Albanian citizen who wrote to me, made suggestions, or asked more of us.”

We believe her. A professor of radiology at the Università Cattolica in Rome, a former head of diagnostic imaging at the Gemelli hospital, a Cambridge career before that, and, five days before she resigned, a place in OncoDaily’s hundred most influential women in oncology for 2026. Nobody who has followed her work doubts that the international engagements are real or that she is qualified for them. The offers were always going to come. That she took them is the least surprising fact of the week.

What we do not accept is the sentence she built around them. “In this year we have taken important steps in health. Many of them are visible today, others have only just begun.” No step is named. A minister who leaves after twelve months and cannot name a thing she finished has told us what the year was. We will name the things for her.

The year on the record
The pattern is the same in every episode, so we state it once. She learned the state of the laboratories from the concession contract and the state of the pharmacies from the inventory, and when the contract and the inventory disagreed with the corridor, she went with the paper.

In October 2025, a month into the job, she sat for the Prime Minister’s podcast and set her own clock. There were “several main problems,” she said, “for which I have many ideas that will take effect within a year, but the final result will be after four years.” She has now left at the first of those two dates. The final result, on her own schedule, was never going to be hers to deliver. The first-year effects were.

On 26 March she stood after a cabinet meeting and said something no minister of health had said in public before her: that after the twentieth of April, and after the twentieth of every month, there would be no laboratory tests for inpatients at Mother Teresa University Hospital, because the funds would have run out. The laboratory service in the public hospitals has been run since a contract signed on 24 April 2019 by a private consortium, and the contract carries a monthly budget ceiling, after which only emergencies are processed. She promised to solve it “within this year.” Within hours her own ministry issued a statement saying there was no interruption of laboratory examinations in any regional or university hospital. Both statements were published on the same afternoon under the same letterhead. Neither was withdrawn.

On 23 April she faced the Kuvendi for the first time in seven months of opposition requests for an interpellation. She was told that the Oncology hospital treats between 100 and 120 chemotherapy patients a day with thirty chairs, all of them donated; that the brachytherapy unit had been out of service for eight or nine months, with some 200 women waiting on it; that Docetaxel and Pembrolizumab were missing from the wards and patients were being sent abroad or into private pharmacies to find them. She did not contest the figures. Her answer to the brachytherapy question was that it would be working “within 2026.” Her answer to the medicines question was a sentence that will outlast her tenure: “Today in QSUT not a single medicine is missing.”

In between came the drug prices. The ministry re-set the 2026 reimbursement prices at the end of January; three days of reports on increases followed, and on 3 February the ministry announced that there were no price increases for 2026 and that the new prices were, on the whole, lower than the previous year’s. Seven weeks later the same ministry adopted a special provision allowing the Price Commission to re-evaluate the 2026 prices on a fast timeline. A problem that did not exist on 3 February had acquired an emergency procedure by 26 March.

What she inherited, and what she did with it
Here the case against her has to concede something, because the concession is what makes the rest of it hold. None of the structures she presided over were hers. The laboratory contract predates her by six years. The hemodialysis concession is older still. The chairs in the Oncology hospital were donated before she arrived. A minister of twelve months inherits a decade, and it would be a cheap editorial that blamed her for the decade.

But she was not appointed to inherit it. The only argument we can see for bringing in a professor from Rome instead of a deputy from the parliamentary group is that the professor can look at the system from outside and say what it is. When the moment came to say what the laboratory concession was, she defended it. Two months after the Special Prosecution searched the offices of the consortium’s lead shareholder and seized documents and telephones in an investigation into the contract, she told the Kuvendi that the public-private partnership had brought “a visible change in the standard of laboratory diagnostics,” from around one hundred tests to 164. The investigation, registered by SPAK on 31 January 2022 for violation of equality in tenders, abuse of office and corruption, went unmentioned.

We will say the next part carefully, because it is the part where the Albanian press has said too much. From 2022 to 2025 Evis Sala was the founding rector of Western Balkans University. According to the business registry, that university is 90 per cent owned by Klodian Allajbeu, the proprietor of the American Hospital group, whose affiliated companies hold the two largest health concessions in the country, hemodialysis at some 84 million euros and laboratories at some 130 million, both under SPAK investigation. There is no charge against her. There is no finding, and there is no document we have seen that shows her taking a decision to his benefit. What there is, is a minister who ran a portfolio in which her former employer held 214 million euros of public contracts under criminal investigation, who defended one of those contracts from the podium, whose ministry in July appointed a second alumna of the American Hospital to run the new state sterilization agency, and who in twelve months never addressed the question in public. It has been in print since her first week. She has now left without touching it, and the question leaves with her.

The distance
The most revealing line in her farewell is the one she probably thought was the most generous. “My commitment to Albania is not tied to a post. It is part of who I am and will continue through my knowledge, my experience and my international professional network.”

Five weeks earlier, at the end of two months of protest, the Prime Minister delivered to his parliamentary group a governance document he called Besa, built on four words: trust, empathy, service, engagement. Whatever else Besa is, it is an argument that governance happens in the post, in the corridor, at the twentieth of the month when the tests stop. It was written for a government whose ministers were felt to be far from the people they governed. Sala held her Rome professorship for the length of her tenure. She faced the Kuvendi once, in April, seven months after the opposition first asked. Her commitment, she tells us, was never tied to the post. On the evidence of the year, that is the one claim in the statement nobody will contest.

She resigned eight days after the cabinet sat its “autumn exam” at Pogradec, where ministers were reviewed on the performance of their departments and, we are told, on their media presence over the summer. The Prime Minister said there that governance had to improve “or there is no reason for it to continue.” We agree with him, and we will hold him to the sentence. If Pogradec measured anything, the Health Ministry cannot be the only result it produced. We are saying, plainly, that she should not be the last to leave this month. The ministers who should follow her out are the ones whose year reads like hers once it is written down: a portfolio described from the desk, a Kuvendi avoided, a promise dated “within this year,” and a departure before the year ends. He has the list. He wrote the document that asks for it.

“Detyrat kanë një fillim dhe një fund,” she wrote. Tasks have a beginning and an end. Hers ended on Wednesday. The one she promised to finish within this year is now somebody else’s, with four months left on her clock and the twentieth of September eighteen days away.