Assessing Primary Care in Croatia: Could it be Moved Forward?

Abstract

It is evidence that countries with strong primary care achieve better health outcomes at lover cots. Therefore, the effort of World Health Organization in promoting primary care as a basic principal of successful health care system is ongoing process. Although Croatia was recognized as a county with primary care orientation due to the development of health centers and introduction of specialization of general practitioners it seems that many health care reforms aimed to the better organization of health institutions and to the decreasing the health care costs not resulted in the higher primary care orientation. By the application of the Primary Care Score instrument in 2014 (Croatia received 11.2 out of 20 possible points), and an international comparison done in 2002 the conclusion is that among 18 OECD countries Croatia could be categorized as an „intermediate primary care country“, obtained the scores just a bit above the mean.