Buying a connection. Private practice in public health care – the case of a Serbian maternity hospital

Informal relations have been widely studied in post-socialist and socialist Eastern Europe. These personal connections represent social capital useable to gain access to social provisions, such as public health care. Drawing on a case study of a large maternity hospital in Serbia, in this article I show that some pregnant women, when they did not have a usable network of informal relations and personal connections ( veze in Serbian) to gain better maternal care and birthing experience in the public hospital, resorted to paying for private prenatal care with the OB/GYNs who are simultaneously employed in both the maternity hospital and private prenatal care clinics. By paying additionally for private care, these women were able to establish alternative, institutionalized relationships with the same medical staff which allowed them to transfer those relationship into  personal connections in the public maternity hospital setting.