“Some people say that the salaries of doctors will be a thousand euros, and they are already that much,” said President Aleksandar Vučić in an interview on one of the regime televisions and then cited the example of a specialist doctor who already has 1,020 euros while doctors are in red covid zones paid more than 1,500 euros. According to the president, both nurses and technicians received significant increases, “from 282 euros to 522 euros”, and those from the covid zone reach 684 euros.
However, these are salaries that include various allowances until the basic salary, even after the last, January and largest increase so far, reaches that line. Healthcare workers point out that low wages from the entire previous decade have been one of the main causes of the mass exodus of doctors and nurses to Western countries, and the situation began to improve only during the pandemic. However, the state leadership did not explain to the citizens the reasons for the mass departure of medical workers abroad, which was only somewhat slowed down by the pandemic. He did not explain his role in that process, nor why the National Employment Service was one of the official channels for the departure of domestic experts.
The entry of the coronavirus showed that the enemy made a joke, that there were not enough medical staff, that “applause at eight”, orders and declaring an entire profession a hero, was not the right motive for superhuman efforts in the red zones. Only then did they start talking about salary increases and new employment.
– Before calling for the last salary increase, from January this year, the government should answer us why, if it cares so much about doctors, again, now in 2025, the application of the law on salary grades has been postponed, which would pay salaries in were certainly increased by about 30 percent. If he cares about the citizens and their right to treatment, why is the optimization in health care envisaged to reduce the number of 300 health institutions to 120 by 2035? Why is everything going in the direction of shutting down primary protection? Let’s be clear, doctors and medical staff will manage, but the question is in what situation the citizens will find themselves. Our union has been fighting for the survival of state health care for the last six years, we believe that this is our task and if we do not fulfill it, 70 percent of the population will not be able to use medical services. This was shown by the example of dentists, when that segment was excluded from the obligatory health insurance – Radomir Panić, president of the Union of Doctors and Pharmacists, told Danas.
He points out that these are the reasons for the dissatisfaction of health workers, as well as low salaries, which did not reach a thousand euros even after the January increases, as the President of Serbia claims.
According to the calculation based on the Rulebook on coefficients in public services and the published value of the base, which is determined annually, nurses in 2012 earned an average of 25,541 dinars without allowances, and a doctor also without allowances, 56,466 dinars. When the salaries of everyone in the public sector were reduced in 2014, salaries in health care also fell. They have been increased by several thousand dinars in the coming years, and according to the last correction of the base, nurses will receive 46,170 dinars in the next period, and doctors, still far from the European thousand, without supplements, will receive 95,891 dinars, Danas writes.
