The Ministry of Health will also propose control of doctors who write sick leave

Nine million euros, which the Health Fund reimbursed for sick leave last year, is only a part of the total amount paid by employers at the level of the entire country. According to the calculation made by the Employers' Union on the basis of data from the Fund on the number of lost working days, as much as 60 million euros were spent on sick days over 55 days.

Health Minister Vojislav Šimun admits that these are huge expenses, but he trusts that the government commission, which will soon start dealing only with sick leave, and in which several ministries will participate, will be efficient.

"That everyone will do their part of the task, so we will redact it significantly. We plan to form it in the next couple of Sundays," said Šimun for Television Vijesti.

All members of the commission will propose measures to control sick leave, but only those that are ongoing. His department will, among other things, request that the documentation for opening sick leave be more extensive and that the existing commissions visit doctor's offices and determine justification on the spot.

"In the institution itself, we invite the patient, who is on sick leave, to see if it is justified. Let's randomize those commissions a bit like this. Let's change their composition more often, maybe every 15 days, and in this way potentially eliminate that influence on the commission in that sense ", said Simun.

And neighboring Croatia could serve as an example. The opening of sick leave is decided exclusively by general practitioners, and last year's changes in the law gave greater powers to the controllers of outpatient clinics.

"'Controllers can personally, i.e. immediately when they establish that a sick leave no longer has a medical indication, close it. These are some changes that are new, and now is it successful? - It seems to us that it is, for the reason that we think that the rate sick leave should be less, we can already see that it is less than in previous years," Nenad Korkut from the Croatian Health Insurance Agency told TV Vijesti.

They are still adding up the numbers for last year, but they already know that it will be better than the year before. In 2022, they spent 217 million on sick leave, but Croatia has 6 times more inhabitants than Montenegro. During the control, which can be carried out even without the presence of the patient, they stopped as much as a third of unjustified sick days.

"In 2022, a total of over 39 thousand of our insured persons or their personal records were examined. + and from that we concluded that there are no longer any medical indications for sick leave in about 13 thousand, which means one third, 33% of those sick leaves were closed," says Korkut.

This model sounds receptive to our Minister of Health. He will also propose to the commission to make a monthly report on doctors who write paid leave, and in Croatia some have been punished by dismissal.

"To stratify in a nice way who writes the most sick days and to deliver these reports to the managers of institutions for inspection, so after a certain time, for example 3 months, if we had any anomalies, illogicalities, those doctors would be invited for an interview at the Directorate for Health Quality Control of protection, let's see if these prescriptions are justified in that number," said Šimun.

Although the law gives Croatian inspectors the opportunity to visit patients who are on sick leave, they do not use it. But even without that, there are fewer unexcused sick days and we don't even know how many there are.