Thomas Hofmarcher, Research Director at IHE – The Swedish Institute for Health Economics, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Our Cancer Dashboard for Serbia has just been released! Written together with Ida Haggren and Katarina Gralén, this dashboard compares Serbia’s performance against European targets and neighboring countries. Link.
I had the pleasure of presenting a preliminary of the dashboard last November at the 62nd Oncology Congress in Serbia, hosted by Nada Santrac and Ivan Markovic, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Surgery. During and after the congress, we had an opportunity to discuss and incorporate additional insights from leading medical oncologists Ana Jovicevic, Marijana Milovic-Kovacevic, Ana Cvetanovic, Bojan Zaric, MD, PhD, Zoran Andric, as well as of Davorin Radosavljević, President of the Serbian Society for Medical Oncology (UMOS), who also contributed with a foreword to the dashboard report.
Major takeaways from the dashboard:
- Clear governance is lacking in the absence of an active national cancer control plan (NCCP).
- The disease burden is similar to other European countries, but there are no data on outcomes (survival rates) and inputs (cancer care spending).
- Prevention is underprioritized and mostly far from international targets, while screening programs are mostly opportunistic and in need of a complete overhaul.
- The quality of diagnostic, treatment, and palliative services is limited by insufficient numbers of specialists, equipment, and access to novel cancer medicines.
We hope that the report can support the introduction and implementation of a new NCCP and other ongoing initiatives to improve cancer care in the country.
A heartfelt thank you to everyone contributing to the report and to MSD Europe & Serbia for great collaboration.”
