In commemoration of the founding of the World Health Organization, April 7 is marked as World Health Day, and this year’s theme is “My Health, My Right.” The aim is to underscore the right of all people around the globe to access quality healthcare services, as well as to safe drinking water, clean air and environment, adequate nutrition, and other factors that affect the realization of the right to health.
The right to health is also one of the key areas in the work of the Ombudswoman – indeed, the most common reason citizens contacted the institution in 2023 was precisely to seek the realization of this right.
According to citizens’ complaints, healthcare services were insufficiently accessible, there was a shortage of doctors and medical teams, and patients often did not receive complete information from healthcare professionals. Oncology patients faced long waiting lists and broken diagnostic equipment, while palliative care patients were too often denied a dignified end of life.
Amendments to the Compulsory Health Insurance Act also led to significant changes for certain groups of insured persons, who lost their status due to their inability to appear in person at the Croatian Health Insurance Fund (CHIF) every three months. This particularly affected persons with disabilities, those with limited mobility or in poor health, as well as students studying outside of Croatia or the European Union. The Ombudswoman warned of the potential negative effects of this provision during public consultations, but unfortunately, the recommendations were not accepted.
Due to this, and the large number of complaints received, the Ombudswoman submitted a request to the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Croatia for a review of the constitutionality of the provisions in the Act’s amendments requiring in-person reporting to the CHIF. According to the Fund’s own data from June 2023, more than 275,000 citizens were subject to this obligation, and by the end of that month, over 100,000 had already lost their health insurance.
In her 2023 Annual Report, the Ombudswoman issued a series of recommendations to strengthen the protection of the right to health – more details are available here, while the full Annual Report of the Ombudswoman for 2023 can be found here.