Psychiatrist Aleksandar Miljatović by final judgment forbidden is to work as a doctor for the next two years, and he was also sentenced to two years of suspended sentence, which can be replaced by a prison sentence of seven months if he repeats the crime during that period.
The investigation and court proceedings against Miljatović were initiated after BIRN discovered that he entered diagnoses of severe psychiatric and neurological diseases in the electronic records of patients at the Palilula Health Center that they did not actually suffer from.
Arrest of psychiatrist Aleksandar Miljatović: Doctor of false diagnoses
As a reminder, the First Basic Public Prosecutor's Office opened a case against the former psychiatrist of the Palilula Health Center, Aleksandar Miljatović, in October 2022, and in December of the same year, a criminal complaint was filed for falsifying an official document after the police collected the necessary information and spoke to seven injured patients.
BIRN's investigation revealed that the manipulation of diagnoses coincided with the period when Miljatović attempted to conduct a clinical trial of the drug pimavanserin, which is used to improve brain function in people with degenerative and progressive brain damage.
BIRN also wrote about the role of the Palilula Health Center, the Ministry of Health and the Agency for Medicines and Medical Devices in approving the implementation of a clinical study of this drug at the Palilula Health Center. In the end, the study was not even conducted.
The problem with false registration of diagnoses became known when patients started coming to the Palilula Health Center who could not exercise certain rights, such as employment, because their medical records stated that they were suffering from severe psychiatric and neurological diseases.
A large number of patients with whom BIRN journalists spoke, who were treated by the then doctor Miljatović, said that their diagnoses began to multiply from the beginning of 2019. Some patients were given as many as 30 diagnoses. Some of BIRN's interlocutors who were registered with severe psychiatric diagnoses such as psychopathy, schizophrenia, mental retardation, Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's could not get a job, get a visa to go to school or work abroad, and some were unwillingly eligible for a disability pension.
