On the 29th June, we participated in the European Health Parliament (EHP) closing session to bring the perspective of allergy, asthma and COPD patients.
The European Health Parliament is a platform, funded by universities, companies and politicians, running from December 2015 to June 2016 that brings together 55 young health professionals to address current and new challenges to European healthcare systems.
Mr. Vytenis Andriukaitis, Commissioner for Health and Food Safety, said that health prevention should be on every national minister agenda, as “risk factors for chronic diseases need to be tackled from all sides, by all sectors, by all Ministers. Prevention is everybody's business”. As a national health minister, Maggie De Block (Belgium) said that we need “Care to change, change to care!”, and stressed the need to create sustainable healthcare systems taking into account patient outcomes.
We attended the session on “Digital skills for the medical profession”, where several Members of the European Parliament and representatives from the European Commission DG CONNECT stressed the need to incentivise the use of electronic devices within the healthcare systems, and to train both healthcare professionals and patients on how to make the better use of technology for prevention and self-management.
However, only the 3% of European GDP has been allocated to health prevention. We are happy that many Members of the European Parliament are asking for a smarter distribution of funds in terms of health policy at national level and but we hope many more take this issue as a priority thus a healthy population is the main pillar for healthy societies.
To know more about our work on prevention please visit our Healthcare and Research sections.
Do not hesitate visiting the European Health Parliament website.