The medical team of the International Medical Center Priora, led by Prof. Ninković, is committed to providing patients with medical treatment and necessary healthcare.
Our patients are always our priority. To ensure the highest level of surgical performance, we invited world-renowned experts in hand surgery and microsurgery to collaborate and consult with Prof. Ninković, Head of the Department for Plastic, Reconstructive, Aesthetic, and Hand Surgery, during a procedure.
Thanks to the extensive international experience, professional network, and friendships of Prof. Ninković, our Center was proud to host Dr Heinz Buerger and Dr Dietmar Hager from Austria.
Dr Heinz Buerger is a specialist in traumatology and general surgery and a subspecialist in hand surgery and microsurgery from Klagenfurt, Austria. He is known for improving the treatment method for fractures of the small bones of the wrist through a microsurgical transfer of bone structures. This innovative technique includes replacing damaged parts of the small bones of the wrist, such as the scaphoid and lunate bone, with small vascularized bone fragments from the femur. Dr Buerger has been promoting this method for years, making him the world’s leading expert in microsurgery for the treatment of osteonecrosis of the small bones of the wrist. He has performed more than 1250 surgeries of this type. Prof. Ninković performed surgeries with Dr Buerger in Munich on several occasions, so he invited him to jointly operate on a young patient from Sarajevo with left-hand scaphoid bone osteonecrosis.
Dr Dietmar Hager was born in a year when humans first flew to the Moon and returned to Earth safely. Since his youth, Dietmar has been passionate about two main fields: astronomy and medicine.
Dietmar’s passion for medicine led him to pursue medical studies in Vienna and specialize in trauma surgery at AKH Linz. He has always been interested in different approaches to hand treatment, leading him to cooperate with medical experts in Italy, Germany, Scotland and the USA, and he also gained knowledge and experience under the mentorship of Prof. Lenny Bodell at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix. Besides surgical practice, he has always prioritized science and teaching. Together with his colleagues, he founded MAZ, the Microsurgical Training and Research Center. He currently works independently in his own practice, performing almost 350 hand surgeries per year. He also provides his expertise to the courts as a medical expert witness. He specializes in hand endoprosthetics, with a specific focus on the wrist and the saddle joint of the thumb. Utilizing a “less invasive approach”, he has developed the “ReMotion” prosthesis technique, thus saving many wrists, preserving mobility and reducing pain. Dr Hager is one of the most experienced surgeons in this technique.
However, medicine is not the only passion of this renowned surgeon. As a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, an ESO Outreach Ambassador and collaborator of NASA, Dietmar has been giving lectures on astronomy and astrophotography for over 25 years. As for leisure pursuits, Dr Hager is an avid athlete and a pilot. He trained extensively in triathlon and pays careful attention to his nutrition, which allows him to draw on his own experiences to help his patients in this area.
We were delighted to welcome Dr Buerger and Dr Dietmar Hager from Linz, Austria, who arrived in Osijek to participate in the surgery of a patient from Sarajevo. These two world-renowned surgeons will join the team of IMC Priora as external associates. We are proud to have expanded our surgical team to include these two world leaders in hand surgery.
