30.04.2012.

Minister visits Kragujevac army club and the garrison ambulance

Visit of Defence Minister Dragan Sutanovac to Kragujevac is another contribution to the development of cooperation with local governments. On this occasion, the Minister stressed that the Ministry of Defense and the Army of Serbia want to have strong civil-military cooperation with Kragujevac, which is a large and important city of Serbia, as this will help promote our military.

The reconstruction was done using the funds of the Ministry of Defence , costing over 20 million RSD.

- Civil-military cooperation and helping local governments, and in this case and the Kragujevac university and the school. Reminding that the University of Defence has good cooperation with the University of Kragujevac, he remarked that this was just one of the contributions of the Ministry of Defence. He added that the Kragujevac Army Hall had been out of use for years and that in the upcoming period, a full reconstruction would restore its former splendor.

The Chancellor of the University of Kragujevac Slobodan Arsenijevic thanked Minister Sutanovac for his the initiative to assist the University in Kragujevac, and for the possibility for the Kragujevac Faculty of Philology and Arts (FILUM) after 12 years to use the Army Club.

The Army Club building is in the center of Kragujevac and is considered one of the finest buildings of its kind in Serbia. It is surrounded by sports facilities, swimming pool and a summer garden and covering some 3,500 square meters. The renovated facility will be available to students of Kragujevac schools.
The end of the visit on the Lepenica River was spent visiting a garrison ambulance, soon to become a Military Medical Center, which will provide in-patient secondary health care to all citizens of Kragujevac and military health care beneficiaries from that region.

According to Minister Sutanovac, reform of the military pension fund, the reform of the military health care will imporve the quality of health care for active and retired members of the Serbian Army.

-With the revenues it will generate, the military hospital in Kragujevac, will be finally put in full function. Today the hospital has 21 medical personnel, and will employ more than 200 employees - the minister said, adding that this would be an opportunity for young professionals from the area.

Serbia, thanks to the military health care reform, as the defense minister said, has enabled civilians to be treated in military centers, which is a plan for Kragujevac as well. In addition, as Sutanovac underlined, this will achieve great savings on travel expenses that had to be paid for treatment in other cities.

Speaking of the importance of the project, the Chief of the Military Health Ministry of Defence, Colonel Dr. Zoran Popovic said that the plan envisions two buildings that will be turned in the next two years into the Military Medical Center.

- Some 80 beds will be for inpatient surgical ward and 40 for internal medicine - said Colonel Popovic explaining that in the region of Kragujevac some 8, 000 military and a significant number of civilians from the surrounding towns gravitate towards it. The plan envisions the treatment of some six thousand patients, which is about 100 thousand different health examinations.