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Abstract Background Sustainable development and public health quite strongly correlate, being connected and conditioned by one another. This paper therein attempts to offer a representation of Europe’s current situation of sustainable development in the area of public health. Methods A dataset on sustainable development in the area of public health consisting of 31 European countries (formally proposed by the European Union Commission and EUROSTAT) has been used in this paper in order to evaluate said issue for the countries listed thereof. A statistical method which synthesizes several indicators into one quantitative indicator has also been utilized. Furthermore, the applied method offers the possibility to obtain an optimal set of variables for future studies of the problem, as well as for the possible development of indicators. Results According to the results obtained, Norway and Iceland are the two foremost European countries regarding sustainable development in the area of public health, whereas Romania, Lithuania, and Latvia, some of the European Union’s newest Member States, rank lowest. The results also demonstrate that the most significant variables (more than 80%) in rating countries are found to be “healthy life years at birth, females” (r2 = 0.880), “healthy life years at birth, males” (r2 = 0.864), “death rate due to chronic diseases, males” (r2 = 0.850), and “healthy life years, 65, females” (r2 = 0.844). Conclusions Based on the results of this paper, public health represents a precondition for sustainable development, which should be continuously invested in and improved. After the assessment of the dataset, proposed by EUROSTAT in order to evaluate progress towards the agreed goals of the EU Sustainable Development Strategy (SDS), this paper offers an improved set of variables, which it is hoped, may initiate further studies concerning this problem.

In this paper we discuss the methodology of planning the promotions of the higher education organizations, which are aimed at target group of potential users of the high education services. Intention is to stress the necessity of planning communication activities in higher education institutions, with the main goal of building positive corporate image and reputation in order to gain leading position on the educational services market. The research problem is to determine the precise timetabling of visiting the secondary schools in order to promote higher education organizations which have equal aims, contents and expected results, but different places of promotion. The original Goal Programming model of deciding process of organizing the visits to the secondary schools is developed. Scheduling the promotion participants in the secondary schools, as the target destination, is done by the model, and the basic criteria were uniformity of their workload. In the case study of organizing the promotions, the suggested model was applied on target group of students in secondary schools as the potential users in The Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade. In addition, we developed and implemented an original algorithm for solving the promotion participants scheduling problems of large dimensions.