Financial Crisis Threatens Healthcare in Montenegro

For patients in Montenegro, a routine medical examination is becoming difficult to schedule because public hospitals are faced with severe financial crisis and a lack of important drugs, basic medical supplies and equipment.

Hundreds of Montenegrins have to wait in line for hours each day at the main public health clinic, the Clinical Centre in the capital Podgorica, and appointments are often put back two or three months due to overbooking and the lack of enough medical staff to perform basic tests and examinations. 

Pensioner Miluna Vucetic told BIRN that she travelled nearly 200 kilometres to Podgorica on Monday for routine specialist procedures but was told that they had been postponed for three months because the equipment needed to do them was broken and "no one knows when there will be enough money for its repair".

"What's worse, this is not the first time that the same thing happened. Last time it was a lack of medicines, before it was about the reagents for some laboratory analysis," Vucetic said.

Forty-five-year-old Zoran Markovic from Podgorica said had to come to the Clinical Centre four times to do a simple test that was needed before he could get further treatment. 

"It's unbelievable that I was once re-scheduled because there were no needles for a blood test," Markovic told BIRN. 

Under growing pressure from the media and patients' rights' organisations, the state Health Insurance Fund admitted last week that it cannot launch a tender for the procurement of basic medical supplies because the state has allocated only five million euro for all public hospitals for 2016 - almost three times less than what is needed this year.

The Fund, the state institution in charge of the procurement of...