Day 3 -- Classes and Lectures

Colin: The agenda for the day was classes and lectures at the Pilar Institute for the Social Sciences & the Andreja Stampar School of Public Health. At Pilar our sponsor Sasa gave us an overview of where Croatia (known in Croatian as 'Hrvatska') sits as a transitional country both in term of its development economically but also as a country that is in the process of “ascension” to become an EU member state. Croatia sits at a definitional cross-roads between Central Europe and Southern Europe and between Eastern and Western Europe and her lecture explained the benefits and challenges that Croatia has in joining its neighbors to the north in economic and travel union.

Afterwords, the director of the Pilar Institute, Dr. Ljililana Kaliterna Lipovcan, gave us a presentation about the history of the Pilar Insitute and then we went to meet Dr. Bojan Baletic, one of the University of Zagreb Provosts, who lectured about the “Bologna” method of educational standardization and integration allowing for students to transfer between European Universities and be confident that they have the proper training necessary no matter where they are to succeed. This is an important step in the EU integration process and was something that we knew nothing about. After this we had a lunch that consisted mainly of meat and potatoes (something that we would find was the standard in our travels), and then broke into individual class groups for the rest of the afternoon.

The Public Health students got to ride the tram and went to the Andreja Stampar School of Public Health. Andreja Stampar (pronounced Andre Stomp-er) was an important figure in the field of “social medicine” in the 1920’s – 30’s, was one of the founders of the World Health Organization (WHO), helped create the concept of community participation in health planning, and promotoed the idea that “top-down, one-size-fits-all” approaches to rural public health were not only ineffective but counter productive. One of the most important things that we learned from the lecturers at the Stamper Institute on this day was that Croatian medical students are required to be well versed in public health (~ 10% of their curriculum is made up of public health classes), and we also learned how everyone is covered by a Basic Health Care Insurance in Croatia that covers almost 80-90% of their potential health care needs. This coverage is paid by people’s employers. For the unemployed this is covered by the government. There is a supplementary insurance available which covers everything that the Basic does not cover and costs about 80 Kn (about $16) per month.