Republican Health Insurance Fund (RFZO) keeps records on the website of how many people are on the waiting lists. As of January 31, 2025, this number is 45.873, and it is one hundred people less than the day before.
The most people are waiting for the installation of knee endoprosthesis (17.921) and hip endoprosthesis (11.526). In total, records of waiting lists it is conducted for a total of 32 interventions.
Until recently, this number was 33, but the record for cataract surgery recently magically disappeared from the list - which, incidentally, was the third longest in November, when Vreme wrote about this problem.
Instead of the number of people waiting for this operation, now only a short link can be found on the RFZO website that leads to the announcement of the Ministry of Health, which was published on December 7, 2024.
"Based on the report of all health institutions from the Network Plan that perform cataract surgery, on 07.12. 303 citizens are on the waiting list for this intervention.
All reports are available in the presentation at the link.
Any other records related to the Waiting List are not valid," the Ministry's announcement reads.
If you go to the link mentioned in the announcement, you will come across a slide show of scanned announcements from various health facilities that say that their waiting lists for cataract surgery have been eliminated.
On December 20, Health Minister Zlatibor Lončar officially announced that, after two months of intensive work and 6.538 operations, the waiting list for cataract officially no longer exists.
"We have good news for the citizens of Serbia and for all our patients. If you remember, a few months ago we started solving that problem on the order of President Vučić. So far we have the results. As you know, the waiting lists for the scanner have been abolished and now I am informing the citizens of Serbia that from today there will no longer be a waiting list for cataract surgery in state institutions," said Lončar to Tanjug in the Government of Serbia.
Records are kept for CT examinations
However, the veracity of this announcement is called into question by several things. First, the minister announced that, in addition to waiting lists for cataract surgery, waiting lists for CT diagnostics were also abolished earlier. In the second case, there are numbers that can support that claim.
Out of a total of ten interventions related to CT examinations, the largest number of people are currently waiting for the first head examination - 125 of them, at the level of the whole of Serbia. In seven out of ten CT scan interventions, the number of people on waiting lists is less than 10.
For cataract surgery, however, daily records are no longer kept on the RFZO website, and the Ministry of Health, in a statement dated December 7, stating that "any other records related to the waiting list are not valid", practically fenced off any data that could be disputed the claim of the Minister of Health that waiting lists have been abolished.
There is a waiting list at the VMA.
And the information that could dispute this assertion of the minister really exists. Namely, one of the institutions that submits records of the number of people on waiting lists to the Republic Health Insurance Fund is the Military Medical Academy (MMA).
According to publicly available data on the RFZO website, 31 people are waiting for cataract surgery at the VMA on January 923. The last person was added to the list on the same day when this text was created.
It is possible that Minister Lončar, at the time of the proclamation that the waiting lists for cataract surgery were abolished, did not take into account the VMA, considering that it is a state hospital that is part of the Ministry of Defense, not the Ministry of Health.
"Vreme" sent an e-mail to the Ministry of Health with questions about why the records of cataract surgery on the RFZO website were replaced by the Ministry's announcement, as well as why the Ministry's records are not harmonized with the records of the Military Medical Academy. The answer did not arrive until the publication of this text.
This casts doubt on the veracity of the claim of abolished waiting lists. If, indeed, the doctor's promptness has eliminated the waiting list for cataract surgery, it is unclear why the RFZO does not publicly record this, as was the case with lists for CT examinations. Well, let it stand, simply - "zero".
Where are the waiting lists distributed?
Draško Karađinović from the Association Doctors Against Corruption tells Vreme that, as far as he is aware, cataract operations are transferred to private institutions with which RFZO has a contract.
"In many private institutions, government ophthalmologists and even directors work, so there is deliberate mystery," adds the "Vremena" interlocutor.
He submitted to "Vremen" the announcement of the director of a state ophthalmology clinic, in which he advertises his private practice.
"What transparency of the waiting list can we expect with a legalized conflict of interest?" How much do the citizens of Serbia pay for ophthalmological cataract surgery, can someone from the authorities tell the total amount?" Karađinović asks.
Legalized conflict of interest
The conflict of interest discussed by the "Vremena" interlocutor refers to Article 60 of the Law on Health Care, which allows doctors to work simultaneously in state and private clinics.
"The doctor does not do what he could do in the state hospital before noon, but puts him on the waiting list, and then refers him to the private sector, where he usually works himself - more precisely, he refers the patient from the state hospital to himself." It is completely clear to everyone that this is a legalized conflict of interest," Karađinović told Vreme earlier.
This practice is increasingly a topic in the surrounding countries as well. Croatian President Zoran Milanović talked about the simultaneous state and private work of doctors in the pre-election campaign, and Slovenia was the first to go one step further, and in January of this year, by amending the Law on Health Care Services, it prohibited employees of state health care institutions to work at the same time in private hospitals.
