Health policies during COVID 19 pandemic in Kosovo

ABSTRACT

Public policy in democratic societies aims to create public value by providing quality public services, regulations and state-organized activities with the ultimate goal of creating a better service towards its citizens. Since policy failure has always been a concern for various scientists and researchers, this paper aims to contribute to improving the quality and efficiency of public policies by providing expertise to state institutions to ensure effectiveness, transparency, inclusiveness and accountability of the entire process.The health system is one of the main pillars of public policy of every country today, and this is especially noticeable after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the world, a problem which radically changed public policies and how are they percept. Kosovo as a new state faces various political and state-building challenges. The functioning of the health system is one of those challenges, which bared the main responsibility in dealing with pandemic.Therefore, the main focus of this paper will be to analyze the public policies introduced by health institutions and government bodies as response to the COVID 19 pandemic. In this regard we will try to answer some questions which are going to be raised within the paper such as how satisfied were the citizens with health policies in Kosovo, the readiness of the institutions and the professional staff engaged, knowledge and use of best practices.In order to obtain the information needed to justify the main objectives of the thesis, beside the content analysis and comparative methods, we are going to conduct a survey with officials and various institutional experts that were engaged in planning and implementation of the policies in time of Covid19 pandemic, as well as with people from private sector and that of civil society.