Year after year health remains high on the EU citizens agenda – yet, there are a lot of work that stakeholders still need to do in order to enhance primary care, putting patient at the centre of our healthcare systems, and ensuring the sustainability of the latter.
With a view to foster debate on this topic, the EFN joins the European Committee of the Regions (CoR), the World Health Organisation Regional Office for Europe (WHO RC EUR) and the European Regional and Local Health Authorities (EUREGHA) in a meeting to discuss the Sustainable Development Goals and their connection to healthcare.
In this meeting participants stress the importance of prevention in healthcare, which is the new key term for the healthcare sector. Due to the burden of the ageing population and the rise of chronic diseases, it is more important than ever before to make sure that our healthcare systems can cope with this extra pressure. It is key for our healthcare systems to have nurses who received the best quality education possible, including their clinical practice. Aiming at improving that, the EFN has also joined the QualMent project.
Speakers consider that all economic investment in healthcare will have a multiplied return into the economic sector, hence implying that decision makers should foster investment in health. Finally, the patient should be at the centre of healthcare, not the disease – thus underlying the need to enhance primary care. All of these reforms that our healthcare systems need to undergo are aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals – which is a topic of discussion too.
Speakers also discuss the influence of digitalisation in healthcare. The EFN is a strong believer in the power of change that digitalisation can bring to this sector, and hence, is an official partner in two EU-funded projects on Electronic Health Records – namely, InteropEHRate and Smart4Health.