EU ministers to seek remedy for ailing health care system

Date: 16/07/1998

By Simon Coss

EUROPE's health ministers will next week try to work out how to maintain standards of patient care while cutting public health spending.

At an informal meeting in the Austrian town of Bad Tatzmannsdorf, ministers will spend two days discussing the difficulties of assuring high standards in the Union's public health systems at a time when all member states are facing an urgent need to slim down their post-war welfare systems.

Central to their deliberations will be a 30-page document on Quality Assurance in Public Health produced by a panel of health care experts, which contains a complex and technical analysis of the sorts of problems faced in many health systems today and suggests possible solutions for both improving the quality of health care and reducing costs.

One chapter deals with the use of medicines in hospitals and by family doctors, while another looks at ways of improving auditing practices in the public sector, taking the particular example of accounting in hospitals.

While ministers will not be seeking to frame any EU-level legislation on quality in health care as welfare systems remain very much a national competence within the Union, they will be looking at ways of sharing information on national practices so as to learn from each other's experiences.

“The EU's member states are confronted to a large degree with similar developments which bring new challenges to health policy,” said the Austrian presidency in a statement. “Demographic changes, new technological developments, a rise in the complexity of medical care, higher expectations and demands from patients and, last but not least, problems with the financing of health services: these are all factors by which current health policy is being influenced.”

The European Commission has warned repeatedly that health-care systems in all member states are in urgent need of reform. Problems caused by an ageing population (the so-called 'demographic time bomb') coupled with changing working patterns, mean that EU governments all face the quandary of how to maintain generous systems which are becoming increasingly difficult to support financially.