30 September – 04 October, Ms Tomoko Furusawa, the IAEA Officer for Technical Cooperation Programme with Serbia, visited our country. The organizer and the host of this visit was the National Liaison Office with the IAEA in Serbian Radiation and Nuclear Safety and Security. Such visits are organized once a year, and are aimed at considering all topical issues concerning the process of carrying out the national programme of technical cooperation in Serbia, including presentations of particularly successful projects in either the IAEA publications, or the IAEA website.
The visit consisted of a number of working meetings with the representatives of different institutions, that is CPs of all national projects carried out within the IAEA TC programme in the current cycle 2018-2019, as well as the pending activities from the previous cycles (SRB/9/004, SRB/3/004). These meetings served to establish the steps necessary for all late activities to be carried out, and to identify issues that might arise.
This was also an opportunity to visit a number of institutions: Institute of Oncology and Radiology of Serbia (the Nuclear Medicine and Brachytherapy unit) in Belgrade, Clinical Centre of Kragujevac (the Nuclear Medicine Centre). The visit to Kragujevac served to confirm whether the existing infrastructure meets the requirements in the field of radiation safety and protection so as to embark on the procurement and import of the equipment planned for by the major national nuclear medicine TC project (SRB/6/013). The visits to the Department of Radiation and Environmental Protection in Vinca Institute (SRB/6/012) and Cigota special hospital for thyroid gland and metabolism diseases on Zlatibor (SRB/6/010) were for the purpose of establishing the sustainability of the projects that had already been carried out, and to gain insight into the practical use of the equipment granted by the IAEA.
The representative of the Ministry of Health of Serbia, as a key party to the preparation and implementation of all TC National Projects, accompanied all of these visits in the field of use of radiation in medicine.