Ambassador Profile-Ivana Antonijevic

Date: 

Friday, May 24, 2019 - 14:45

How did you become involved as implementation ambassador for Serbia?

My national organisation - Pharmaceutical Association of Serbia, the section of hospital pharmacists organise periodical meetings for all hospital pharmacist in Serbia. On those meetings, I heard a lot about the European Association of Hospital pharmacist and about Statements in general. With support from my colleagues, I decided to get involved and try to bring Statement closer to all hospital pharmacist in Serbia through translations and constant reminders on how Statements are important for the progress of our profession which will enable better patient care - the main goal of our profession.

Why do you believe that moving towards Statement implementation in Serbia could help to improve patients outcomes in the country?

Moving towards Statement implementation will give an equal approach to each patient in every Serbian hospital. This approach will be on some way

standardized in every aspect and it will be the product of work from a multidisciplinary team of professionals.

Is there a specific Statement(s) or section(s) that you think are more relevant or urgent for Serbia?

I think that this depends on every hospital in particular. But, Serbian hospital pharmacists have the opinion that there are not enough hospital pharmacists to cover all area of our profession - there is one pharmacist per two hundred hospital beds. And that is the main problem for us.

But generally I think that two statements are the most relevant:

1. In the current situation and in the era of IT world I think that we are not involved enough in the creation of general Information and Communication Technology (ICT) framework of the hospital including electronic health (eHealth) and mobile health (mHealth) procedures - statement 1.7.

2. And the other very important thing which I think will be changed soon is that we are not a part of the multidisciplinary team in each hospital department, but in some of them we are the part of the team - statement 1.1.

You and your colleagues organized a workshop during your last national Congress to promote the self-assessment tool and to provide training on how to use it. Why do you think that is important that hospitals their pharmacies using the self-assessment tool?

Forming the first assessment, the pharmacist can see the results of every section. This will guide the pharmacy team on what Section they have to pay attention the most - to create the plan for how to improve the process of work. When the team achieve some goals they could update the assessment and see the improvement that they have made. In this way, the service of pharmacy could be improved.

Second important thing is that hospital pharmacy can compare results with the other similar hospital. This will create connections between hospitals to exchange experience with similar problems. 

The third thing is evidence-based resources which will help to create a more relevant plan for improvement of the services.