Hospitals remain without medication

The health budget over the years has been around 180m euros, until by 2018, this budget has grown to 200 million.

However, patients are continuing for years to take care of the drugs needed for treatment.

At the University Clinical Centre in Kosovo, as the theatre centre referred to all of Kosovo, health professionals, but patients as well, tell Radio Free Europe that there is a lack of essential drugs.

Leonora Bajraktari, who had operated on her brother in this institution, relates her experience on the matter.

My brother is in a hospital, and unfortunately he had to buy everything. We had to buy the injections, the goats, the gloves, so everything, because even the most basic things are not for the delivery of services at the University Clinical Centre of Kosovo, namely, in the Surgery”.

Besides the doctors we have for free, there's nothing else in the card service. Neither do they have drugs for pain, so we've constantly bought the bar, and Bajraktari tells us.

Meanwhile, Emergency Center Director Basri Lenyan says that emergency drugs needed to save the lives of patients in serious health cases are owned, although he has stressed that there are many drugs from missing essential lists.

“Clinical emergency drugs are available. There are drugs and peripheral spenders missing for weeks at Emergency Clinic. Despite the ongoing demands on the central baranator, which is responsible that our demands are necessarily forwarded to the Ministry of Health, these demands have not been met”, Lenyan says.

He explains that lists of drugs needed in the clinic are constantly handed over to the central barnator, but the latter do not meet their demands.

“We, always, put constant pressures that the essential list is a must and we, as health professionals, should not think of drugs or other periphery material”, Lenyan explains.

Even at the Paddy Clinic at the University Clinical Centre in Kosovo, director Muharrem Avdiu says there is a lack of essential drugs. He adds that there are times when they face parents who are unable to provide the necessary drugs for child treatment.

We're not better than the other years, but we're not even worse than the other years. The missing drugs are usually purchased by the patient's family. We try to make the therapy we describe, at affordable prices. There are complaints every day, and we are not satisfied that there are complaints, but we doctors are obliged to make decisions that are not easy in the emotional sense, since parents are often unable to provide therapy”, Avdiu says.

However, from the overall health budget, about 21m euros per year are earmarked for the budget needed for drugs and spending material in Kosovo.

But, health officials say this budget is insufficient to meet the essential list and patients' needs.

The essential list of drugs has never been able to complete as a whole since the last war in Kosovo.