Narodni Front is the major public maternity hospital serving Belgrade, delivering more than 10% of all the children born in Serbia each year. Given high demand, which the hospital was not able to fully meet with its existing facilities, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) supported the renovation and outfitting of a new delivery room to help expand access to essential care for mothers and their newborn babies.
The capacity added by the new delivery room, inaugurated in December 2023, is helping reduce wait times, enhance the quality of care, and improve the experiences of both patients and hospital staff. Specifically, the new space and the equipment it contains enable medical personnel to conduct C-section operations and provide care for women with high-risk pregnancies.
The creation of the new room at Narodni Front marked the latest milestone in the nearly two-decade collaboration between SNF and the Princess Katherine Foundation, also known internationally as Lifeline, to strengthen health care in Serbia.
To date, SNF and Lifeline have collaborated on half a dozen projects in Serbia, including procuring a digital mammography system in 2008 so that a mobile Lifeline unit could provide breast cancer screening for women throughout the country, particularly in remote areas. This mobile mammography unit, which has screened nearly 200,000 women so far, is still on the road helping women catch breast cancer early and get the care they need.