in Serbia

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Serbia – change in attitude of medical professionals

Recently there is a lot of positive energy related to TB control among healthcare workers. Because after many years of isolation of the country they were able to get proper training courses and upgrade their knowledge they also received tools to work with equipment, drugs for first time after many years all first line anti TB drugs for the whole treatment course for all the TB patients in Serbia were available within this programme. Doctors and nurses were more than happy to use the new computerised data collection system and to be involved in all activities organised by our programme towards improvement of their practices also it counts for laboratory workers and consequently their attitudes towards patients became more open and patients not only in Belgrade or bigger cities can get high quality diagnostics and treatment of TB.

At the beginning of our project they were specifically worried that they would get enough drugs to treat each patient for the whole treatment course. After our first procurement of anti TB drugs they ordered much more drugs than they really needed. Later when we did an analysis we concluded that there was up to 10 times more purchasing of drugs from TB dispensaries than they really needed. Nowadays its not like that because they know they have enough drugs enough consumables for laboratory work that everything works ok so the situation became more normal than in the past.