Skopje, 3 October 2025 (MIA) — Europe's main organization representing family physicians in Europe, the European Union of General Practitioners, is holding Friday and Saturday its Fall General Assembly in Skopje to express concern over the salaries of local family medicine practitioners and push the state's health authorities to move from paper to computerized patient records.

European Union of General Practitioners vice president and Association of General Practitioners of North Macedonia president Dragan Gjorgievski said local medical specialists in family medicine were not paid enough.

"The financing model is becoming more and more inadequate for the situation we have. Because our villages are getting emptier, our cities are getting emptier, Macedonia itself is moving out of the country and a large share of the population is aging, so we need a new way of financing," Gjorgievski said.

He also said local physicians had hoped for a long time that the current Minister of Health Azir Aliu, a programmer by trade, would create a complete electronic health care system.

"This means that paper charts will be replaced by electronic medical records," he said, adding that this would streamline health care providers' workflows.

"And finally, once and for all, the family medicine specialist should get his role," Gjorgjievski said. 

"We now also have the support of the European Union, considering some member states have submitted a directive in the European Parliament that will make the family medicine specialty equal to the other specialties. Macedonia, unfortunately, still does not recognize us as family doctors," he said.

According to him, general practitioners should not be paid the same as family medicine practitioners. He said family medicine should be equally valued as gastroenterology.

Gjorgjievski also noted he has been Association of General Practitioners of North Macedonia president for four years and saw four health ministers come and go in the meantime. Yet none of them, he said, had found a way to solve these problems.

"For the first time, I must admit, we received an email from the Ministry of Health yesterday, inviting us to a higher-level meeting Monday to present 12 changes to 12 health laws. We will see what the changes are," he said.

European Union of General Practitioners president Tiago Villanueva, a family physician in the Portuguese National Health Service, said the organization had filed a motion to the European Parliament, through 11 member states' ministries of health, to officially recognize family medicine as a distinct medical specialty in the EU.

He said the document would also be submitted to the local Ministry of Health so that it, too, recognizes family medicine as a specialty and so that local family physicians can get the right credentials as well as higher salaries. mr/