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The practice was needed to achieve the necessary preconditions for the implementation of public health policies relating to the health of the Roma population as a vulnerable group. It was necessary to create a system that would make it possible to create an accurate picture of Roma health from available and routine public health statistics, in order to focus the planned health measures on accurate indicators and evidence.
This research is the first based on combining healthcare data and ethnic data in Croatia. Even though the Roma people (as well as other citizens) were included in the national healthcare statistics, the main challenge was to include in the analysis only the data that refer to Roma citizens, while there was no possibility of differentiating by ethnic origin. This practice represents a certain innovation in the context of policy planning, since all the previous policies were created based on approximations of the healthcare needs of the Roma population, not on accurate health care indicators that stem from the healthcare system.
This research was based on pairing the aggregated data of the Croatian Institute of Public Health from public health databases and registers (health data) with data of the Ministry of Interior Affairs (ethnic data). The healthcare data that were used derived from the internal databases and registries, and referred to the following areas of health: hospitalisations, primary healthcare system, diabetes, drug abuse, mental health, the Colon Cancer Preventive Programme, women’s health and disability.
The research collected data from 19,594 Roma people in Croatia, after establishing the prerequisites for further analysis and planning the interventions to inform the public health policy framework.
Croatian Institute of Public Health (Hrvatski zavod za javno zdravstvo): ravnateljstvo@hzjz.hr
Ms Vesna Štefančić Martić, MD, MPH: vesna.stefancic@hzjz.hr
https://www.hzjz.hr
