Keywords: Family medicine, the future, Croatia
Introduction:
Croatia is the country that gave the world the medical visionary Dr. Andrija Štampar, whose principles are still the foundation of public health. Today, the state of public health in Croatia is getting worse every day, and Family medicine is facing the most problems and challenges.
Method:
Review paper.
Results:
We have 2,214 family medicine doctors in Croatia. The average age of LOM is 52 years, and the share of women is 78%. There are 713 doctors over the age of 60. Unfortunately, it is already clear to us that there will be no one to replace them, because we have only 146 residents at the moment. In the rural parts of Croatia, there have been no doctors in practices for a few years now. The administrative burden placed on us by the health administration is becoming unbearable and takes up a large part of the time for patient care. The number of daily contacts in the average practice before the pandemic was 80-120, and now during the pandemic it has increased to 150-200. Calculated in minutes dedicated to the patient it is 2-3 minutes per patient. Only in 2021. we performed 10,058,276 telephone or e-mail consultations, which is an increase of 267% compared to 2019. Croatia has a strategic plan for the development of patient safety, but it is not being implemented at all. The new law about traffic safety is underway, which regulates that a family doctor in his practice, after examining a patient, immediately suspends the patient's driver's license.
Conclusions:
All of the above poses a threat to patient safety, reduces the quality of health care and ultimately leads to illness of doctors, or burn out. We ask ourselves - how to proceed, especially when we will not have extraordinary circumstances and when there is no pandemic COVID 19?
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