I work at General Hospital Karlovac Pharmacy as a specialist of clinical pharmacy and as a quality manager. My specialization paper was about incidence of drug interactions at hospital admission and discharge.

When was the first time you learned about the European Statements of Hospital Pharmacy? 

The EAHP delegates from the Croation association have given us the information about how the European Statements of Hospital Pharmacy we adopted as they were a part of this hardworking process, so I was familiar with the Statements from the beginning.

How did you become involved with the project?

Since I am one of the members of clinical pharmacy section, at the time of becoming involved with the project I was also finishing  my specialisation programme, thus, I was attented every hospital pharmacy lecture or meeting at Croatian pharmaceutical society and the Croatian chamber of pharmacy, and it was only a matter of time after I was given some kind of responsibility to promote hospital pharmacy within Croatia. Becoming involved with the project was just one step forward in promoting qualities and needs of hospital pharmacists.

Why do you think the implementation of the Statements will be good for Croatia?

Hospital Pharmacy has poor special regulations in Croatia so our goal is to change our regulations through implementation of European Statements of Hospital Pharmacy  in order to improve the requirements for working space, number of hospital pharmacists and pharmacy technicians. I hope that this implementation project will help us show to our Ministry of Healthcare and to hospital managers the benefits of the hospital pharmacy profession and the need of our profession.

What do you think are the biggest needs and barriers for Statement Implementation in Croatia?

Until few years agao our profession was underestimated, but now that we have more hospital pharmacy specialisaiton our voice has become louder and now we need support from hospital managers in order to improve hospital pharmacy activities. So the first goal would be to show the need for the support profession.

What is Croatia doing to move towards Implementation?

We are trying to promote the statements among hospital pharmacists in Croatia so they can then have the informational when they are talking to their management in attempt to improve practice, increase number of employers in order to obtain good hospital pharmacy.

Do you think that the Self-assessment tool and the Statement Implementation Learning Collaborative Centres (SILCC) will help hospital pharmacists in Croatia to move towards implementation?

I am sure that the Self-assessment tool and the Statement Implementation Learning Collaborative Centres (SILCC) will help hospital pharmacists in Croatia to move towards implementation because the SAT is a perfect way to demonstrate to the hospital managers how much help we will need from them in order to become more productive because a lot of our work depends on the equipment. Statement Implementation Learning Collaborative Centres (SILCC) is a great way for our pharmacists not just to learn and see something new and high-quality practice, but to bring those new ideas and processes and practices to our country where we already have some problems with expanding our role amongst other healthcare workers.

What are you doing in your hospital to move towards implementation?

As I am a quality manager in my hospital, there is an idea to implement also accreditation standards in order to get hospital accreditation. For now only few private hospitals are accredited, and the new goal is to expand accreditation to clinical and general and special hospitals. The idea is to use European Statements of Hospital Pharmacy as a tool to assess the level of improvement of medication management in hospital pharmacy and on the wards because they describe the needs and responsibilities of pharmacists than the accreditation standards. This is just an idea for now, but it may be very useful in few years