Where Returning Medics Are Working: Ten New Contracts
Ten doctors, nurses and technicians from Germany, Sweden, Slovenia and Norway signed work contracts with Serbian health institutions. Here is where they now work.
How many people actually pack their bags and come home? Today the answer is concrete: ten. Returning medics from Germany, Sweden, Slovenia and Norway were awarded work contracts with Serbian health institutions on August 2, handed to them by Health Minister Zlatibor Loncar.
This is not a single profile. The group includes doctors, a pharmacist, nurses and medical technicians, people who spent recent years working abroad and are now being placed in ten cities. The Ministry of Health says the jobs are in Vranje, Krusevac, Kraljevo, Pecinci, Sombor, Kragujevac, Aleksinac, Prokuplje, Novi Sad and Belgrade.
Who is coming back, and to which institution?
The list is short, and worth reading in full, because it shows that it is not only the big hospitals filling positions:
- Dr Milan Ralovic, a neurology specialist, spent ten years as head of department at Marien-Hospital Euskirchen in Germany. He continues his work at the Clinical Center of Vojvodina.
- Dr Dragana Cirkovic, a pediatrics specialist with more than 16 years of experience in Slovenia, is now at the Pecinci Health Center.
- Tamara Drazic, a pharmacist, arrives from Norway to the Sombor General Hospital.
- Nurses from Germany: Jelena Bobeva joins the Krusevac General Hospital, Danica Popovic the Zemun Clinical Hospital Center, and Tatjana Fakin, after ten years in Germany, the Vranje Institute of Public Health.
- Medical technicians: Zoran Lazarevic joins the Studenica General Hospital in Kraljevo, Miodrag Vojinovic the Aleksinac Health Center, Igor Stojanovic, after five years in Germany, the Prokuplje Health Center, and Aleksandar Mijajlovic, with ten years of experience in Sweden, the Kragujevac Institute of Emergency Medicine.
Look at those addresses again. Only two are in Novi Sad and Belgrade. The other eight are heading to Pecinci, Aleksinac, Prokuplje, Sombor, Krusevac, Kraljevo, Vranje and Kragujevac, places where a single pediatrician or a single neurologist changes the on call schedule for an entire department. For a patient in Pecinci, that is not a statistic, it is an appointment that now comes sooner.
Where does an application for return go?
Everything runs through the Diaspora Cooperation Office of the Ministry of Health. That office matches a health worker employed abroad with the Serbian institution that is missing exactly that profile, so coming back is not a matter of sending a resume at random to hospitals.
Ten names in one day sounds modest until you look at the running total. Through that same office, more than 350 health workers have found jobs in domestic institutions to date. It is a total built group by group, over several years now. The Ministry says applications keep coming in, so this will not be the last group this year.
Marking the handover of the contracts, the health minister said:
The return of our medical professionals is the best confirmation of progress and trust in Serbia’s healthcare system, but also an important contribution to further improving the quality and availability of healthcare for all citizens. Every doctor, nurse, technician or other health worker who decides to come back is a major boost for our healthcare system. These people bring valuable knowledge and experience gained abroad, but their decision to put that knowledge to use for the citizens of Serbia matters even more. Our task is to make it possible for each of them to build their professional and family future in their own country.
Loncar added that the state, through the Diaspora Cooperation Office, will keep supporting every health worker who wants to return.
Our advice, if you have someone abroad
If someone in your family works as a nurse in Germany or as a technician in Sweden, and has spent the last three years saying they would come back if only they knew where, pass this along: the address is the Diaspora Cooperation Office of the Ministry of Health, not the classified ads of individual hospitals. The people on today’s list went through exactly that route.
One detail from their resumes says more than the numbers. Ralovic was a department head in Germany, Cirkovic spent more than a decade and a half in Slovenia, Mijajlovic ten years in Sweden. None of them came back at the start of a career, they came back from positions people do not walk away from lightly, and now that experience is entering the shift schedules in Novi Sad, Pecinci and Kragujevac.
