Building of effective state administration authorities for control of occupational health services in Serbia and North Macedonia

Description

The project focuses on providing comprehensive assistance and transfer of Slovak experience in the field of occupational medicine in the Western Balkans, respectively in Serbia (RS) and North Macedonia (NM). The beneficiaries of the project and the partners are two national key institutions for occupational medicine: the Institute of Occupational Health of RS “Dr.Dragomir Karajović” and the Institute of Occupational Health of NM. The project solves a key problem in the field of occupational health in these two countries: lack of control of occupational medicine services in the system of occupational health services (OHS) in RS and NM. Achieving the main goal of the project, that is strengthening and expanding the human and technical capacities of these institutes for the performance of control of OHS at the national level will limit the possibility of poor performance and circumvention of their obligations, while the control of the implemented services will give a presumption of comparable quality. This will significantly improve the overall area of prevention and health protection at work with a positive impact on the working population in RS and NM and solve problems of vulnerable groups on the basis of equal access to OHS for men and women. Based on Slovak experience, the joint SR-RS-NM team will further focus on the creation of functional digital registers for the registration of verified suspicions of occupational diseases (OD) and acknowledged OD, in order to enable better analysis of the data and meet the reporting obligations of RS and NM to the European Statistics on Occupational Diseases-EODS.  Emphasis is placed on increasing the sustainability of results and raising the profile of the support provided by Slovak Aid through communication tools, including the WHO Occupational Health Collaborating Centres in RS and NM.