Improving health tourism management in Serbia as a tourism destination: Opportunities and expected effects of development

Health tourism is a form of tourism that has a growing importance in the overall tourism business. The Republic of Serbia follows world trends and is becoming increasingly competitive in health tourism. However, although there is potential for greater development, this potential is still not fully utilized, which indicates that more adequate management of the development of health tourism is needed. Accordingly, the subject of this paper is the improvement of the management of health tourism in Serbia in terms of analysing the possibilities for its development and the expected effects of that development. The aim of this paper is to establish: the characteristics of the desired workplace in health care/health tourism, motives for working in institutions dealing with health tourism, familiarity with terms from the domain of health tourism, evaluation of management and language competencies, the attractiveness of certain elements of the health system for the development of health tourism in Serbia, the current state of development of health tourism in certain elements of the health system, financial and non-financial effects of the inclusion of health institutions in health tourism and the state of facilities, equipment and materials in institutions that deal with health tourism compared to institutions that deal with some of the classic forms of health care. A survey was conducted in order to achieve the stated aims. The obtained results represent guidelines for the further improvement of the management strategy for the development of Serbia as a health tourism destination.