Social prescribing is a return to the roots of public health — a solution to the physician shortage that was outlined as early as 1938.

When we discuss today’s shortages of physicians, rising healthcare costs, and overstretched systems, we often behave as if we are searching for entirely new solutions.
Yet the irony is that a man nearly a century ago had already described them.

**Social prescribing is Štampar for the 21st century.

And the WHO was built on ideas we are rediscovering today.**

One of the great visionaries of global public health – Dr. Andrija Štampar – outlined this framework back in 1938.

For a contemporary audience, an even more remarkable fact is this:
👉 Štampar was one of the key founders of the World Health Organization (WHO)
👉 and the first President of the very first World Health Assembly in 1948.

In other words: he laid the foundations of the global public health system as we know it.

Štampar wrote that health systems must operate within communities, that “healthcare work is not the monopoly of physicians”, and that social factors often determine health more strongly than medicine itself.

This is exactly what link workers do today:
they take on the non-medical needs of patients and connect them to support in the community.

The result?

– less pressure on physicians
– faster access for patients
– lower system costs

Perhaps social prescribing is not a new idea at all — perhaps it is simply a return to Štampar and the foundations of public health.

OpinioNet was created by following all nine of Štampar’s principles and applying them to the challenges faced by modern working families.
Testing shows that OpinioNet is universal and internationally applicable: it works across all healthcare systems because it is grounded in the sustainable public-health values that Štampar established long ago.

My teachers — Selma Šogorić, Zvonko Šošić, Stjepan Orešković, Slobodan Lang and Slaven Letica — from the postgraduate public health program at Zagreb’s “Štampar” School have left a lasting mark on everything I do today.
Some inspired me with their words, others with their example — but all of them, a quarter of a century ago, laid the foundations of my understanding of health, community and responsibility.
Because of them, OpinioNet is sustainable, steady and flexible at the same time.
To them, I also owe my fearlessness in defending my intentions and plans.

Marijan Gjukić