Dentists who have contracts with the Health Fund have only been accepting emergency patients since yesterday, striking in this way due to lower limits for January and the delay in December payments, which they receive from the Fund.
Guesting on Boje jutra on TV Vijesti, Dr. Marija Čanak Iličković, a specialist in preventive and pediatric dentistry, said that the problem is not just in finances, but in the state's long-standing attitude towards them.
"This is the introduction to the strike. We are accepting patients, but only for emergencies. So, we provide first aid, we do not send anyone back from the office if they are in pain, but we do not do fillings, we do not do aesthetic fillings and we are not currently accepting retired patients for the production of new prosthetic devices until we see how the situation will be resolved. We are aware that the Health Fund is not the only address we should turn to and we have also turned to the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Health because we know that these funds and budget determination are in their hands. However, we also know that temporary financing is current. We have already gone through these temporary financings, but at that time our invoices were reduced precisely proportionally to this temporary financing by one twelfth"; the dentist said.
She said that she and her colleagues received invoices for January reduced by 40 percent, while they worked the entire month thinking that the amounts would be the same as in December.
"I would like to emphasize one more thing, so that the public does not think that we are doing this only and exclusively for the sake of finances. Patients should also know that we are doctors, we are a serious branch of medicine, we are not service providers and we are not artisans. So, we are doctors who have been somehow suppressed all these years and when we tried to participate in the creation of health policy before, they never took us seriously. As a preventive health professional, I participated in many attempts to negotiate to create this preventive program. The director of the Fund said in a show two days ago that this prevention is also wrong. It is not up to us dentists, who are now private entities, to determine and implement the preventive program, but the state, the Ministry of Health, the Institute of Public Health," she stated.
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