Motovun, Croatia 2019.
This past July in Motovun I had again the privilege to be an active participant at the Symposium of the Pub Hub team on Croatian Health Service. The interesting discussions between the presenters of the Croatian Ministry of Health, the Croatian Parliament, the Medical and Pharmaceutical Chambers, the Health Employers Association and many other interested domestic and foreign health professionals were focused on the possibilities of leading the health systems and providing better health care integration.
Through the presentations of projects based on the inter-regional collaboration and cross-border transfer of knowledge and technologies, there was an agreement on the need of new direction in development of the health system in Croatia.
I presented the case of health system development in poor countries, based on my experience in helping the organisation of health care in Afghanistan. But, as Croatia belongs to a more developed group of countries striving towards the most modern health system organisation, to that aim l I also presented an analysis of the process and challenges of organising a multidisciplinary ERAS (Enhanced Recovery After Surgery) protocol implementation at my Department of traumatology, bone and joint surgery at the University Clinical Hospital Zagreb, which is a ground zero medical center of excellence in the categorisation of health institutions in Croatia.
The finale of the Pub Hub symposium in Motovun was a panel on human resources issues in the Croatian health system where I had an active role in an interactive discussion with other panellists from the Croatian Ministry of Health, Pharmaceutical Chamber and Health Employers Association. During my introduction speech I pointed to the imperatives for a more realistic view too the national threat caused by health workers deficiency in Croatia and for the prompt need for a radical intervention in our county’s and national government authorities in order to stop this trend of medical staff flight.
Through an interesting interactive discussion with the audience, I presented my idea about the health insurance policy in Croatia: that all patients and working able people should be guaranteed a standard package of health services and that all other services beyond this basic package should be made available through additional payments to different, private, primary, competitive health insurance schemes. That would provide an individual financial patient contribution to the financing and create individual incentives for a more responsible behaviour towards one’s own health and consumption of medical services.
This change would enable the continuation of the basic standard care for every patient, while at the same time it would create a more realistic and sustainable financing of the health care system and human resource management for the overall wellbeing of all employees and users of the health system in Croatia.