We are here as all across Europe struggling to stay open for our clients; drop-in centres got closed for longer stays so clients only get in if allowed by the local authority or get material over the window, many of them are making reserves- taking 4-6 boxes, actually this week it seems that they started to get out more (due to nice weather) though we don’t have a police hour or similar. My organisation is providing mobile outreach so we need passes to go outside Zagreb. We had to stop for 8 days because we also had an earthquake and aftershocks in Zagreb.

There is a lot of stress in the overall population. Not to mention our clients.
There are problems with finding drugs due to closed borders so we noticed a slight increase in robbing pharmacies.

OST is still being distributed but the max for 2-3 days. Some NGOs suggested we should lobby for 2 weeks (each patient can get OST once per year for 2 weeks for holidays) but this way doctors can actually see them more often- mostly now via windows. Croatia has a unique system of OST distributed by primary care doctors and they are reluctant to have bigger amounts of OST in their practices.

Not to mention that we don’t know when the rest of our funding from Ministry of Health (20% of annual grants) will be paid because all payments from the government side are shut for 3 months at least.
Many local authorities decided not to fund NGOs this year. So our network (5 harm reduction NGOs) made a plan of how to survive, calculating all the commodities we have, if needed we will support each other…

But the biggest concern is trained and skilled outreach workers that will leave us once we don’t have any more funding for their salaries and as mentioned before: all of these made an impact on the general population and their mental health so I am afraid and concerned for our clients.

Centre of Zagreb is ruined, hundreds of buildings so we expect a rise in the number of homeless people (currently they are in student dorms but only until Sept).

So many challenges….and harm reduction is not something that our government is making a priority.

Iva Jovović
Life Quality Improvement Organisation FLIGHT