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North Macedonia’s Health Minister Azir Aliu said today that a special commission has determined that 10 patients underwent unnecessary heart surgery from 2022 to 2025.
“Out of the 25 reported cases, the Internal Commission for Cardiological and Cardiac Surgical Interventions analyzed 19, of which 10 cases were found to have undergone unnecessary surgeries or to have been referred for surgery unnecessarily,” Aliu said at a press conference.
The Minister of Health of North Macedonia formed this internal committee, which includes well-known Macedonian cardiologists, lawyers, and economists, at the end of August after Macedonian cardiac surgeon Saško Kadev publicly made accusations of unnecessary surgeries in private healthcare.
Commission President Žarko Hristovski said that this is a preliminary report, not a final one, and that in the second phase, together with experts from abroad, they will analyze the work of all institutions across the country that perform cardiovascular interventions.
In August, the Ministry of Health sent a letter to health institutions to submit data on the total number of procedures and surgeries performed for the period January 2022 – August 2025 for interventional cardiology procedures performed, such as coronary angiography and stenting, vascular angiography, and cardiac surgery/vascular surgery.
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