About 1.600 doctors are registered in the register of the Medical Chamber of Serbia every year, and about 600 of them, on average, request a certificate for applying for a job abroad. By cross-checking this data, researchers from the Center for Policy Emancipation (CPE), in cooperation with the Union of Doctors and Pharmacists of Serbia, came to the conclusion that just under 40 percent of licensed doctors leave Serbia each year, that about 1.000 of they remain to work in the country.

An additional problem, as emphasized by Milos Vuchkovic, program coordinator from CPE, is that a third of the total number of employed doctors of medicine (20.186) in Serbia are over 55 years old, Politika rs reported.

- There are 6.728 doctors, according to the latest data. They will retire in a maximum of nine years. To that, let us add a reminder that in order to renew the specialist staff, it is necessary for the doctor of specialization to learn from a mentor, an experienced specialist doctor. And the specialization itself lasts three to six years. From all this, we conclude that the 1.000 doctors who are newly trained to perform healthcare activities annually cannot cover the approximately 6.700 jobs (mostly specialists) that will remain vacant in the coming years due to retirement. That is why the question arises whether Serbia will have enough doctors to treat its population - says Vuckovic.

There is no data on the number of nurses and technicians who go abroad, because they do not receive a certificate because they are not required to be members of the chamber.

- At the same time, we officially have 1.269 doctors in the labor office in September of this year who are mostly without specialization, while there are about 67 specialists - says Vuckovic.