Ohrid's Pediatric Ward Is Back to 24 Hours After a Five-Year Gap: 10,000 Check-Ups in One Year, and Citizens Bought the Bed Sheets

For five years, children from Ohrid who needed hospital treatment were driven to Struga. Not because there was no ward - the ward existed - but because there were not enough pediatric specialists, so it ran as a clinic with limited hours.

Now it is open 24 hours again. And that is news worth saying out loud, in a country where health stories usually go the other way.

The children's ward at Ohrid General Hospital cares for children from the earliest, neonatal age up to 14 - through outpatient services, on-call shifts, inpatient treatment, diagnostics, and follow-up until recovery. That is a description of a normal pediatric department. For five years it was not normal.

What one year of full hours did

Since round-the-clock hours were introduced, the ward has carried out around 10,000 check-ups and admitted around 120 children. Ten thousand check-ups in a single year - that is the number that shows how big the hole was while the service was missing.

Hospital director Dr Goran Markoski points out that the ward has a future because five doctors are in specialist training, and their return will strengthen capacity further.

Five trainees. That is the answer to the problem that closed the pediatric ward - and an answer that should have started five years ago, not one.

The equipment arrived, but not from where it should have

Over the past period the ward was equipped with inhalers, a pediatric ECG, a pulse oximeter with a neonatal sensor, a gas analyser, a suction unit, hospital cots, air conditioners, heaters, children's bed sheets and blankets, new staff uniforms and a small children's library, and the toilets were renovated.

A list that sounds good until you look at where it came from: with support from charitable citizens and organisations, through donations, and with funds secured by the hospital management.

So the sheets and blankets for a children's ward in a state hospital were provided by citizens. That is not a story about generosity - it is a story about a budget. When donations cover the basic equipment, the question is not why people give, but why they have to.

And one more pressure nobody plans for

Ohrid is a tourist town. During the season the number of patients rises by 30 to 40 percent, putting extra strain on both the system and the staff. It is predictable, it repeats, it is the same pressure every summer - yet capacity is cut to the number of residents, not the number of people actually in town in August.

The ward is working again. That is good news and deserves to be read as such. The second half of the news is that it took five years and other people's donations to get back to where it should have been all along.