Free Dermatology Screenings Reach Eight Serb Towns in Kosovo
Serbia's dermatology association is offering free skin and mole checkups from August 6 to 8 in eight Serb towns in Kosovo, including Gracanica and Orahovac, with no referral or appointment needed.
Free dermatology screenings began on Thursday, August 6, at the health center in Gracanica, and by Friday will cover eight Serb communities in Kosovo south of the Ibar. The screenings are carried out by the Association of Dermatovenereologists of Serbia in cooperation with the Gracanica health center, under the patronage of the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Serbia, with the goal of catching malignant skin changes early.
In Gracanica, doctors are seeing patients from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The campaign runs through August 8, with checkups held in these locations:
- Gracanica
- Pasjane
- Ranilug
- Orahovac
- Velika Hoca
- Strpce
- Priluzje
- Gorazdevac
What patients need to bring
Nothing. No health insurance card is required, no referral from a family doctor is needed, and no appointment has to be booked. Patients simply arrive during the facility’s posted hours and take their place in line.
The exam covers skin and moles and is done with a dermoscope, a device that magnifies the area and lets the doctor tell a harmless mole from a suspicious lesion. Alongside the exam itself, doctors also give advice on protection from ultraviolet radiation, a part of the campaign that is easy to overlook, since it applies to everyone, not just those who came in about a specific mole.
The ministry has also announced plans to examine clergy and nuns, meaning the team is going beyond the clinic itself, to monasteries and parishes where people rarely make it into a health center on their own.
Why these particular communities
The Association of Dermatovenereologists of Serbia organizes this kind of screening across Serbia, specifically in places that lack enough dermatology specialists. Serb communities in Kosovo fall into that category. For a patient from Velika Hoca or Gorazdevac, that means getting a specialist exam in their own town instead of traveling to a larger clinical center, and travel is exactly what usually pushes a checkup off until a mole turns into a visible problem.
That is also why the schedule for each location was published a day before the team arrived. Without advance notice, three days of work would in practice mean a few dozen exams instead of a few hundred.
The schedule is arranged so each of the eight towns gets its own slot within the same three day circuit, so a patient who misses the day in their community has no other chance before the team returns to Kosovo. For Gracanica that day was Thursday, and the times for the other locations are published by the health centers where the exams take place.
What earlier rounds have shown
This is not the first time the same team has worked this model. According to a statement from the Ministry of Health, during just two days of free dermatology screenings in Prijepolje and Nova Varos, one hundred serious diagnoses were caught in time.
That number is the clearest explanation for why the campaign keeps coming back. One hundred diagnoses in two days across two small municipalities says less about how many people are sick than about how long they had gone without seeing a dermatologist. When a specialist arrives in a place that normally has none, people who have carried a skin change for years finally come in to be checked.
What happens after Friday
The campaign in Kosovo wraps up on Friday, August 8. A patient in whom a suspicious change is found gets referred for further workup, and that is the moment when the real value of these visits shows itself: a skin change caught early is treated with a simple procedure, while a melanoma caught late requires oncology treatment.
For communities without a permanent dermatologist, the question remains what happens between one visit and the next. Three days in August clear the backlog, not the reason the backlog built up in the first place.
