The COVID-19 pandemic has brought general practitioners to the first line of triage, treatment and assistance to colleagues in temporary Covid hospitals. Without sparing their health or their lives, they have professionally, bravely and responsibly shown that they are worthy of the trust of their patients and the profession they perform.
Covid outpatient clinics throughout Serbia are full again. We are talking to head physician Dragana Trifunović Balanović, PhD who has been successfully managing the Zvezdara Primary Health Center for more than a decade, about all the challenging tasks the pandemic has set for general practitioners.
- From the starting position that seemed like a mate position, we slowly, pulling good moves, listening to people from the field and following the instructions and protocols of Batut and the Ministry of Health, took over not only Covid patients, but also separated healthy from potentially infected ones, cared at the same time about pregnant women, children, and a number of abruptly discharged non-covid patients from hospitals that were urgently converted to Covid hospitals. Nurses and doctors became brave fighters overnight, wearing overalls and fighting with an unknown disease. It was a challenge to procure and use the equipment in an adequate way, to quickly learn numerous novelties in completely extraordinary conditions. No one withdrew, no one went on sick leave. Young residents helped their colleagues and we all functioned as one - our interlocutor proudly says.
Even in the most difficult phases of the pandemic, each patient received the necessary service.
- We did not return the patients, we did not ask which health center they belonged to, whether they have a booklet or not. We treated injuries, bites of dogs, insects, took care of the injured, if necessary and gave birth, visited newborn babies, visited people treated at home in the terminal stage of the disease, tried to do everything in our power to make impossible conditions more normal for all our patients.
And how much knowledge is needed for one doctor to be able to do all of the above?
-Specialization in General Medicine lasts 4 years and you must know everything. In three minutes, you have to make a working diagnosis, to know whether the patient who is holding his/her chest will die, or has heartburn, or it is just a panic attack. And all this with very few diagnostic options. In the hospital, you have a whole team of consultants, a powerful diagnostics, and a patient who has already been triaged to a certain extent. Hence, the specialization in General Medicine is challenging, difficult, responsible, and yet so little recognized. And the most difficult situations like this, remind us of how much a general practitioner knows and is worth.
The head physician Dragana Trifunović Balanović, PhD is not only a successful physician and manager of the Zvezdara Primary Health Center, but also a mentor and lecturer at the faculty in both undergraduate and postgraduate studies.
- I always tell my students, if you have chosen to be a physician, you must always have time for the patient. The excuse "I didn't have time" must not be an excuse for human life. It is a particularly great challenge to determine the risk factor in a seemingly healthy person, when the symptoms of the disease have not yet manifested. So, catch the disease at the earliest stage until it has not yet manifested on the clinical horizon. This type of prevention is available to us, physicians in primary health care, and a very important segment of work because we can react on time, educate patients how to behave, what to eat, what type of physical activity to do, what additional examinations to do to prevent the disease or delay the onset of complications.
And finally, how much did the pandemic make the role of the director of the Zvezdara primary health center more difficult for her?
- It is easy to be first among equals. It is important to listen to your co-workers. The challenge was to protect patients, to protect employees, to distribute them properly so that everyone is evenly burdened. No one has ever complained, Could it have been better? It can always be better, but I am very proud of my health workers, their decisions, their expertise, their dedication to work and I want to say a big thank you to them. You can't be a good physician if you're not a good person. If you love people, you also love your patients, and they feel it, so even though they are sometimes angry with us, they know very well that we are always there for them – the head physician Dragana Trifunović Balanović, PhD said.
