The radiation machine at the University Clinical Center (UCC) Tuzla has not yet been acquired. Patients still travel to other cities, and pay considerable costs, but also wait months for their turn. While tenders fall, citizens fear for their lives. Some even lose the battle of life.
Nurse Senka Dervišević from Tuzla fought for the lives of children suffering from cancer at the Tuzla ward for almost three decades, and today she is fighting for her own life. After being diagnosed with a rare type of leukemia, transplants, chemotherapy, expensive drugs followed, and now the disease has spread to the brain and is receiving cytostatics in the spinal canal. Senka is in the hospital, and states that radiation is waiting for her, which, like the others, she will have to travel to.
She shared her difficult experience and feelings for BHRT.
“I personally consider that a humiliation of the human race. It’s as if we are children and we go there on an excursion alone by bus. Can you imagine such a patient who has to go through all that? Not everyone is in a situation where they have someone to help them financially or in any other way, to pay an apartment, food, a taxi from the hospital to the accommodation and vice versa,” Dervišević points out.
Vesna Marjanović, who takes a friend to Zenica for radiotherapy, but is also the daughter of a cancer-stricken mother, witnesses the suffering and costs of patients. Vomiting and pain are just part of the arduous journey to the hospital in another city. She says that they only reimbursed her friends for the cost of transportation in the amount of the bus ticket.
“They gave her 560 marks, reimbursed her, and she spent over 2,000. She had to pay for sleeping, because there is no room in the hospital. Normally, she has to feed herself. She had to go privately to get findings,” says Marjanović.
Vesna describes an even more difficult situation when it comes to her mother.
“The mother did not go for radiation, she is 82 years old, she cannot bear the trip. They did not call the emergency room. She is a pensioner and the woman could not allocate so much money for radiation,” said Marjanović.
Patients for radiation travel to Sarajevo, Zenica and Mostar, but after receiving information that reception in Sarajevo was suspended, we contacted this institution. For BHRT, they reply that work is in progress on the uninstallation of two devices and the installation of two new linear accelerators. For this reason, the provision of radiotherapy services for patients from the Tuzla Canton is currently suspended until the installation is completed. The Institute confirms to us that the transportation was paid in the amount of the bus ticket, and that there is no legal basis for refunding the funds for accompanying the patient. Also, private accommodation is not a type of health service.
RIAD KURTALIĆ, spokesperson of the Health Insurance Institute of Tuzla Canton
“We have a certain number of requests from insured persons who submitted a request for reimbursement of funds for paid accommodation during radiotherapy. We have no legal basis to refund funds for that service”.
The question arises as to how many patients do not have the financial means to save their lives, can a patient in such a condition travel by bus alone? Social networks are flooded with difficult confessions, in which they talk about the long wait for an invitation to radiation, the loss of loved ones.
“More and more medicines are missing, the devices in most cases are worn out or about to expire, and new ones are not being procured. Everyone knows this well. Believe me, the staff is running out of strength, no one takes care of them either, everyone is silent, suffering and failing from exhaustion,” says Senka Dervišević.
The BHRT reporter also spoke with several patients from Gradačac and Gračanica. They bear witness to enormous costs, months-long waits for an invitation and struggle with administrative obstacles. One of them states that her brother waited for the invitation to go to Zenica for about five months, hoping every day that the phone would ring. He lost the battle for life, he did not receive the call.
Who will be responsible for the suffering and loss of life? While the tenders for the procurement of devices in Tuzla are falling, there is no other progress except for the transfer of responsibilities. How much do citizens’ lives cost?
