State Secretary in the Ministry of Trade, Tourism, and Telecommunications Tatjana Matić has said that the cooperation with the National Contact Centre for Online Safety of Children with the representatives of the health centre in Serbia of extreme importance, since the excessive use of new technologies and creation of addiction as a consequence of that, have been recognised as an issue necessary to be tackled with the aim to protect children using the ICT.

With that goal, the technical trainings conducted by the Ministry on using the apps of the National Contact Centre for Online Safety of Children, connected to over 500 individual contacts in all institutions cooperating with the Centre, have covered around one hundred healthcare workers in Serbia.

“In those trainings we could get directly from the healthcare workers the recommendations regarding the education of children on online safety. They think such educations should take place in the 3rd and 4rt grade of primary school, when we should preventively act on the awareness regarding the risks in using the digital technologies”, says Ms Matić.

State Secretary has said that the operators of the contact centre have visited 17 primary health centres on the territory of Belgrade where they provided technical instructions for work on the apps with directors, paediatricians of school dispensary and psychologists, to be used in the future for accepting and tackling the cases forwarded by the Contact Centre.

The trainings were held in primary health centres in Aranđelovac, Zrenjanin, Smederevo and Sremska Mitrovica, and that on August 15, they will take place in Ruma, Valjevo, Pančevo, Novi Sad, Smederevo, Stara Pazova, Požarevac and Šabac.