Tomislav Mestrovic (Croatia): HIFA Country Representative of the Year 2020

13 February, 2021

The HIFA Steering Group is delighted to announce the winners of our HIFA Country Representative of the Year 2020 awards.

First we would like to say how grateful we are to all our 266 Country Representatives for their invaluable volunteer work for HIFA.

The overall winner is: Tomislav Mestrovic (Croatia). Congratulations Tomislav!  See the 3-minute HIFA YouTube video where Tomislav shares his experience.

Tomislav Mestrovic is a medical doctor and a clinical microbiologist with a PhD in biomedical sciences, and an Assistant Professor at Croatia's youngest public university, University North. He is also passionately invested in global health communication, health literacy, science journalism and science diplomacy. Tomislav was appointed by the Ministry of Science and Education of the Republic of Croatia as a Managing Committee Member to COST Action on evidence-based medicine run by the European Union. He holds several positions in international societies that resulted in many volunteering initiatives.

During 2020 Tomislav has made HIFA an obligatory part of the curriculum for the graduate-level course "Public Health and Health Promotion", which forms a big part of the MSc program "Management in Nursing" at the University North in Croatia. He has achieved a severalfold increase in membership from Croatia. He has introduced and highlighted HIFA at undergraduate-level courses. He presented HIFA and HIFA-Portuguese at an inaugural lecture as a visiting professor/course coordinator at the Instituto de Microbiologia Paulo de Góes of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. And he has highlighted HIFA in a book/monograph chapter "The Universal Access to Essential Health Information and Adequate Health Literacy as Indispensable Human Right" (Chapter authors Metrovic T, Neuberg M, Kozina G, Pakenham-Walsh N) which will be published in the first part of 2021. A worthy winner indeed!

Special commendations are awarded to:

Jackeline Alger (Honduras) 
Stuti Chakraborty (India) 
Didier Demassosso (Cameroon) 
Sanchika Gupta (India) 
Gladson Vaghela (India) 

Congratulations everyone and thank you for all you do to support HIFA towards our shared vision of a world where every person has access to the reliable healthcare information they need to protect their own health and the health of others, and is protected from misinformation.

All HIFA members are welcome to join our growing global team of HIFA CRs. See here for more info.

Not yet a HIFA member? Join here (free).