Inpatient Detoxification Procedure and Facilities: Financing Considerations from an Eastern European Perspective

Abstract

Eastern Europe and the Balkans region report high rates of alcohol abuse and addiction (OECD, 2009). Alcohol detoxification procedures in the countries of the European Union (EU) tend to be conducted at the primary care level or at specialized units associated with the psychiatric clinics. These facilities provide medical treatment to help achieve and maintain abstinence, often through initial 24-h psychiatric supervision. In the EU, these patients often already have an awareness of the reality of addiction and show a will to decisively tackle it (Hayashida, 1998). By visiting these facilities, they attempt and often succeed in preventing an abstinence crisis when they end a period of heavy drinking. Treatment protocols are intended to reduce and eliminate most symptoms of withdrawal (Beshai, 1990). Serbian everyday experience, however, seems to be radically different from that of the EU. At first, we point out that we are observing a typical middle-income Eastern European transitional economy, in a society that is primarily Caucasian, secular, and with a low fertility rate, and is in many ways similar to Western …