Serbian patients want greater choice in their treatment of paid health insurance, hence they are increasingly seeking to be treated equally as patients in other countries of the region and Europe. Patients want to be treated at private medical practices with no additional payment. On the other hand, the private health sector is increasingly developing in vocational and technical terms, which is very important for the quality of healthcare treatments in Serbia. Regulation of relations between the private and public health sector is one of the entry requirements for the EU, so regarding this issue we asked the following question.

 

 

Dr. Zoran StankovIć,
Serbian Health Minister

 

One  of  the  obligations  that Serbia  has  to  fulfil  in  order to join the EU is to counterbalance the state and private health sector. In order to do that, we  need  to  reform  our  health  system,  which,  amongst  other things, entails changing the Health Insurance Law and Health Protection Law. Another imortant fact to mention is that the laws that we enact should be applicable here and acceptable to the EU, bearing in mind the fact that we often adopt laws that  are  very  similar  to  those  in  highly  developed  European countries  that  we  simply  cannot  follow  through  with  as  we don’t have proper financial or technical conditions.
We also need to make a decision on whether our doctors are going to work in both the state and private health sector or not. My opinion is that people who have private practices should not be employed in the state sector. This will help us to avoid situations that usually result in a substantial number of complaints, i.e. we should allow patients to come to a state-run health facility, do all the checkups, get a diagnosis and then send them to a private practice for treatment with the doctor who organized everything. In this way, we would also create conditions conducive to hiring more doctors and other medical staff.