On 5 December, the Committee of the Regions Interregional Group on Health and Wellbeing organized the meeting on “The State of Health in the EU Cycle”, which is a two-year initiative that has been carried out by the European Commission. The European Commission collaborates with the European Observatory on Health Systems Policies and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The State of the EU’s 2019 Companion Report and the 2019 Country Health Profiles were made public on 28 November and the meeting aimed to discuss the five big trends in the transformation of our health systems and to understand the key findings from the Country Health Profiles.
During the first part of the meeting, Sylvain Giraud, Head of Unit at DG SANTE discussed the five main transformations in our health systems including the digital transformation for health promotion and disease prevention and the understanding of acccess to medicines. For the other three transformations, please refer to the minutes EUREGHA published.
The European Observatory on Health Systems’ Willy Palm afterwards focused on the key take aways from the country profiles. He emphasized that the project is not about the naming and shaming of countries with poor health statistics but rather focuses on how these countries can improve and transform their health systems. All the countries are compared according to the three performance dimensions of effectiveness, accessibility, and resilience.
