In July 2023, the Ministry of Health announced a reform measure that reduces the administrative burden on primary care physicians, which includes family physicians, paediatricians and gynaecologists.
After evaluating processes in primary healthcare, the Ministry of Health and the Croatian Health Insurance Fund (CHIF) identified challenges, including an administrative overload of physicians. Several processes have now been transferred from doctors to the administrative services of the CHIF, including the procedure of checking and deciding on the justification of issued travel vouchers, as well as requests of insured persons for reimbursement of transport costs. This reform aims to enable doctors to better devote themselves to patients, which is also the focus of the comprehensive health system reform.
In addition to reducing the administrative burden, the government and the health administration aim to respond to other challenges in primary healthcare through a series of reform measures. These include financing the specialization of 922 doctors at a cost of EUR 130 million (including the specialization of 147 doctors in primary healthcare–related specialties), equalizing the coefficients of hospital specialists and specialists in primary healthcare, specialist training of nurses in the field of emergency medicine, strengthening the coordination role of the health centre, strengthening the primary healthcare infrastructure, reorganizing the emergency medical service, merging of ambulance and emergency medicine, establishing nursing counselling centres to provide basic care for certain chronic diseases, and introducing psychological and speech therapy as well as physical therapy at health centres.