Due to the carelessness of the government, the problem of lack of medical staff in our country is becoming more and more pronounced, and the question of who will treat us in the future is rightly raised.
Data from 2021 show that the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH) has 2,168,602 inhabitants treated by only 50 cardiologists. Almost half of them are in Canton Sarajevo (CS), 22 cardiologists to be exact. However, that number is more than insufficient and, therefore, in the CS, there is one cardiologist per 19,000 inhabitants.
Not aligned
As the Minister of Health of CS Vranic told, the biggest problem is in the legal framework. He explains that the Ministry of Health at the federal level, which is led by the HDZ, has not changed the legal framework since 2010.
”We still have those standards and norms that are outdated in relation to the number of inhabitants. So they never followed each other. For example, there is one surgeon per 3,000 beds, which is out of place everywhere in the world. I want to say that no one has changed any rules in the last eight years,” Vranicsaid.
He adds that the federal level is not aligned with reality.
”They are floating somewhere in the period of 10 years ago. Those 10 years were slept on, and then we find ourselves in a situation where we lack cardiologists, pulmonologists…” pointed out Vranic.
Long wait
The same problem is indicated by prim. Ph.D. Denis Mackic, specialist in internal medicine and subspecialist in cardiology, head of the Department of Internal Medicine of the General Hospital “Prim. Dr. Abdulah Nakas”.
”We have been waiting for more than half a year for an ultrasound of the heart, for a holter, for diagnostic procedures, and all this shows that we need three times more cardiologists when it comes to Sarajevo. We have three in the General Hospital, while there are about 20 in the Sarajevo University Clinical Center (KCUS). And this waiting for those diagnostic procedures means that there is a terrible lack of staff,” said prim. Dr. Mackic.
The problem, he says, is the lack of planning for the needs of the population.
”If it is clearly seen that year after year there is a six-month wait for diagnostic cardiology examinations, then I guess the alarm should be set and it needs to be said, here are 20, 30, 100 cardiology specialists, so that people would not have to wait so long. And that is the job of the ministries at the canton and federation level,” pointed out Prime Minister. Dr. Mackic.
Data of the Institute
Data from the FBiH Institute of Public Health show that Herzegovina-Neretva Canton has 11 cardiologists, while Tuzla Canton has nine. There are three cardiologists in Una-Sana Canton – USC (per 200,000 inhabitants). There are none at all in Livno, while each of the remaining five cantons has one cardiologist, Avaz writes.
E.Dz.
