High Representative in Banja Luka
The High Representative, Paddy Ashdown, will visit Banja Luka tomorrow. He will visit the “Dom zdravlja Banja Luka” (Health Centre) and its Casualty Department, where he’ll meet medical staff whose salaries are four months in arrears. More then 120 patients are treated in Casualty each day, and the facility has been “temporarily” located in the basement of Dom zdravlja for more then 30 years!
There are plans to move onto the ground floor but there is no money for this at the moment. The hospital also needs to purchase new ECG and oxygen equipment.
Among the many problems associated with health care provision are sub-optimal allocation and spending of scarce financial resources, low utilization rate of hospital capacities, the poorly defined network of health care institutions, an unclear system of referrals, and inefficient administration.
There will be a photo opportunity during the High Representative’s visit, at 10:20.
Later in the morning the High Representative will meet university students and hold an open discussion on the current issues and the future of BiH, at the Students House. Media are invited to cover this event, at 11:45.
PDHR Hays to Visit Sarajevo Centar Municipality
The Principal Deputy High Representative, Donald Hays, will visit Sarajevo Centar Municipality tomorrow. This is the latest in a series of visits to municipalities all around Bosnia and Herzegovina, during which Ambassador Hays is being briefed by mayors and municipal workers on the challenges faced by municipalities in improving the services they are able to offer citizens.
Ambassador Hays will be accompany Mayor Ljubisa Markovic on a tour of the municipality that will include the Gorica urban regeneration project and the Betanija-Sip community de-mining and development initiative.
Launch of Phase III of the Bulldozer Process
Tomorrow afternoon, Ambassador Hays will attend the launch of Phase III of the Bulldozer Process. The main participants at this meeting will be BiH Prime Minister Adnan Terzic, Entity Premiers Hadzipasic and Mikerevic and representatives of the new BiH Employers Organisation. The event will take place at the Joint Institutions Building.
The first item of business will take place at one o’clock, when the Federation, RS and Brcko employers’ organizations hold a general assembly, at which they will adopt the statutes of the new State-level employers organization. At the end of the general assembly, they will formally and publicly hand over the request for registration of this new organization to Prime Minister Terzic.
This will also signal the start of Bulldozer Phase III.
The hand-over, followed by a press conference with the three prime ministers and the directors of the new BiH Employers Organisation, will take place at 15.00.
The regional Bulldozer committees will start collecting new proposals for economic reforms and then work with the Emergency Reform Units to identify the reform proposals that are likely to have the highest potential impact on the business environment in BiH.
Bulldozer Phase III will see a further increase in the role of the domestic structure in the Bulldozer Initiative. Overall coordination, which in Phase II was still the responsibility of the OHR Bulldozer Unit, will be gradually transferred to the newly established BiH Employers Organization.
We will issue detailed media advisories on all these events later today.