This year, the number of Croatian doctors who have collected the necessary documents for work abroad has reached pre-pandemic 2019 levels, the Vecernji List daily said on Tuesday.

Citing the Croatian Medical Chamber, the daily reported that, this year, 838 doctors have collected the documents for work abroad.

One of them is Dr Ivan Cvjetko, a vascular surgeon at Zagreb’s Merkur Clinical Hospital, who is not happy at his job. Born in Germany and trained in the United States, he has returned to Croatia believing in its prosperity.

“I have applied to the Medical Chamber in Dubai and got a contract in Saudi Arabia. The system in Croatia is untenable. Common sense tells me that I should be licensed for work abroad and maintain close contact with foreign human resource companies so that I can be ready to move anywhere within a month. It’s unbelievable that despite my 20 years of surgical experience, no one cares about my motivation and work conditions,” Dr Cvjetko told Vecernji List.

In the past nine years, 1,032 doctors have left Croatia in search of better work conditions abroad. Their departures decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic, but this year the doctors have started to gather the necessary documents in greater numbers again, Vecernji List said.

“No one supports you, no one asks you about the quality of your work. All this is very discouraging. Right now, I am halfway to deciding to leave Croatia. I really want to avoid that step, but unless things change for the better soon, I will leave,” Cvjetko added.