Belgrade, August 4 - The head of the Military Medical Academy Major General Prof. Miodrag Jevtić, MD, PhD, received the members of the Serbian Armed Forces medical team who were deployed to the UN peacekeeping mission MONUC in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in the period from November 10, 2007 to July 23, 2008. That mission is currently the largest UN peacekeeping mission involving the total of 18,800 personnel from different countries. General Jevtić congratulated the medical team members on successfully accomplished missions and affirmation of the Serbian Medical Services’ capabilities within the framework of peacekeeping missions. The fact that the most responsible and complex missions are assigned to our teams speaks for itself.

The Serbian Armed Forces Medical team was composed of a team leader LtCol. Marko Kovinić, a surgeon from the Niš Military Hospital, Capt. Milan Djokić, a medical technician, Dejan Stanković and Mlan Mišić, senior staff seargents and Suzana Ilić and Jadranka Kovačević, the Serbian Armed Forces civilian employees.

As of 2003, when the Memorandum of Understanding was signed by the Governement of Serbia and Montenegro and the United Nations, our medical teams for air medical evacuation (AMET) are deployed to the peacekeeping mission in Congo. Each AMET team is composed of 6 specially trained members: two physicians specialists in surgery or anesthesiology and four medical technicians. Their main mission is air-lift of seriously ill or wounded patients out of remote locations what requires delivery of critical care to such patients during transport from lower to higher health care level facilities, that is ambulance stations and mobile hospitals to the UN tertiary care hospital in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo or to the hospital of the fourth health-care level in Pretoria, the Republic of South Africa. Such a sensitive and difficult mission, i.e. transport of the most severe and complicated cases is carried out by a Serbian AMET team. In addition to that mission, membres of the Serbian AMET team deployed to DR Congo are engaged in aeromedical repatriation of the UN members who due to their health condition are not able to pursue their missions and in providing medical escort and close protection for VIPs as well.