New health minister announced in minor reshuffle 

Former trade and industry minister Jan Christian Vestre will take over as health minister, PM Jonas Gahr Støre announced Friday. He takes over from Ingvild Kjerkol, who resigned last week. 

Cecilie Myrseth will leave her post as fisheries minister to take over as the new trade minister, while Marianne Sivertsen Næss will step into the vacant fisheries role.

All three ministers are MPs for the Labour Party. 

Norway’s PM is no stranger to reshuffles at this point, with a slew of ministers stepping down or being replaced amidst scandal. 

Signs of GP crisis easing 

Former health minister Ingivld Kjerkol said that the GP crisis in Norway was showing signs of improvement. 

“The government’s move to save the GP scheme is yielding results. The GP crisis is heading towards the end,” Kjerkol told Norwegian newswire NTB this week. 

Figures from the Norwegian Directorate of Health indicate that the situation has improved somewhat. 

The report shows that the number of people without a GP has fallen from 228,000 to 181,000. 

Last year, 237 GPs were recruited, and the number of GPs increased by 111 between December 2023 and April 2024.

Norway’s GP system has a patient list scheme whereby doctors are assigned a patient list. 

The number of patient lists with a permanent doctor has increased by 30, and the number of lists without a permanent doctor has decreased by 46 to 276 this year. 

King Harald to return to duties next week 

King Harald will return to royal duties following an infection and procedure to have a pacemaker fitted. 

He will return to work on April 22nd, after first falling sick on Malaysian island of Langkawi in late February. 

Crown Prince Haakon, 50, has stepped in as regent in the king’s absence.

Norway’s immigration authority closes 1,000 cases into suspected cheating 

The Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI) has dismissed more than 1,000 asylum and immigration cases after the Ministry of Justice told them to reduce the queue of cases.

The UDI closed cases where suspicions of immigration fraud were raised to prioritise what it considered the most pressing and serious cases. 

“We were in a situation where a large number of cases were created, but our capacity was not proportionate to the number of cases. This meant that we did not get a good enough grip on the matters that we believe are the most serious. At the same time, it led to a good number of these cases becoming very old,”  Frode Forfang, director of UDI, told NRK. 

The UDI also decided last year that cases older than three years old would not be reopened, according to the report from NRK.

Norway and Ukraine sign security accord 

Norway announced a new security accord with Ukraine on Monday. 

“Norway will be providing long-term military, political, financial, and humanitarian support to Ukraine,” Norway Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide said after meeting Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv.

“The agreement demonstrates our clear political commitment to continue to stand by Ukraine, as we have done since Russia’s brutal, full-scale attack over two years ago,” he added. 

The deal will be formally signed and presented when the PM meets with Ukraine’s president next.