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Yugoslavia The Contemporary Health and Welfare Systems
Yugoslavia's 1974 Constitution required the organization of
"self-managed communities of interest for health care" to manage
the health care system
(see Socialist Self-Management
, ch. 3).
The communities of interest represented both the users and the
employees of health-care facilities. Thus, such groups included
delegates from the workers' council of the health-care facility,
local citizenry served by the facility, and delegates from local
enterprises contributing funds to the facility. Generally, each
commune had a health center, although cooperative use of
facilities was possible through agreements among individual
communes. Health stations--less equipped facilities available for
primary first-aid--were more numerous. In 1988 health centers
numbered 450, health stations 2,550.
The federal Constitution entitled all Yugoslav citizens to
health care in a variety of situations. Infectious diseases and
mental illnesses judged dangerous to society received automatic
treatment. Workers were guaranteed care for occupational diseases
or work-related injuries. Pregnant women, infants, and
preschoolers received comprehensive medical care. Children
younger than fifteen, students younger than twenty-six, and
citizens over sixty-five were entitled to general medical care.
The health-care system distributed contraceptive devices, and
free abortions were available up to ten weeks after conception or
later under special circumstances. Federal law required that
women receive uninterrupted paid maternity leave beginning at
least 28 days before expected delivery and ending at least 105
days afterward. By 1990 some republics had increased minimum
maternity leave to as much as one year. Working mothers also
received income compensation for time taken from work to care for
sick children.
Yugoslavia's social welfare system nominally provided
services for destitute persons and families, physically and
mentally handicapped persons, broken families, alcoholics and
drug addicts, and elderly persons without relatives to care for
them. In 1986 about 3 percent of the population received services
from the social welfare system. In 1984 Yugoslavia operated 340
social work centers, including shelters, juvenile homes, care
centers for handicapped children, foster home placement agencies,
nursing homes, and facilities for care of the mentally
handicapped and mentally ill. Altogether, the system employed
about 2,100 social workers and 1,000 other professionals in the
mid-1980s. Self-managing communities of interest managed the
centers, which provided services to 687,000 Yugoslavs in 1984.
* * *
Contrasts in Emerging Societies, edited by G.F.
Cushing, et al., is an anthology of primary-source material
describing socio-economic conditions in southeastern Europe in
the nineteenth century. It provides an excellent glimpse of life
in the Yugoslav lands during that period. The National
Question in Yugoslavia by Ivo Banac is an exhaustive
treatment of the disparate Yugoslav peoples and their relations
in the years immediately before and after the formation of the
Yugoslav state. Steven L. Burg's Conflict and Cohesion in
Socialist Yugoslavia and Pedro Ramet's Nationalism and
Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1963-1983 discuss Yugoslavia's
national question in later decades. Stella Alexander's Church
and State in Yugoslavia since 1945 describes the relations
between the postwar Communist regime and the Serbian Orthodox and
Roman Catholic Churches. The Yugoslavs by Dusko Doder is
an insightful and entertaining description of the virtues and
foibles of the Yugoslav peoples in the 1970s. Kosovo: Past and
Present, edited by Ranko Petkovic , presents an official,
pro-Serbian assessment of the Kosovo problem, while Studies on
Kosova, edited by Arshi Pipa and Sami Repishti, presents the
Albanian side of the conflict. Jugoslavija, 1945-1985,
edited by Dusan Miljkovic, contains a wealth of statistical
comparisons of socio-economic indicators for the Yugoslav
republics that a non-reader of Serbo-Croatian can easily decipher
with the help of a dictionary. (For further information and
complete citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of December 1990
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