Investing in Europe’s health workforce of tomorrow: scope for innovation and collaboration
All Member States of the European Union face common challenges in ensuring and maintaining an adequate workforce to meet the changing and growing health needs.
The ageing of the population, the growing number of chronic diseases, the shift of hospital care to prevention and primary care place a heavy burden on the health sector.
The Belgian Presidency of the EU Council organized a ministerial conference on this subject, to further raise the awareness for the problem and to support the European Commission’s efforts in developing a coordinated approach in supporting national and regional policies in this area.
For Mrs Onkelinx, Deputy Prime Minister and Health Minister of Belgium, “the health sector is changing rapidly like any other sector in society. It is our responsibility, together with all stakeholders, to identify today the needs of tomorrow and the best way to meet them not only at national but also at European level”.
Mr John Dalli, European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy, said "I welcome this conference on a European Health Workforce by the Belgian Presidency. I believe we must do everything we can to ensure that Europe has an adequate health workforce that is able to meet the growing healthcare demands of our ageing population. This is essential to ensure that European citizens receive safe and good quality healthcare."
The conference brought together 250 participants, including Ministers and senior health officials of all European Member States, of the Candidate and EEA countries, but also high level representatives of various international organizations such as the World health organization and the OECD and of numerous professional stakeholder organizations.
For two days they focused on key elements such as assessing the future needs in health workforce, both in numbers and in types of skills, well-distributed across the country and across care settings, changing needs in competence profiles, training and lifelong learning, recruitment and retaining of health workers.
Finally, the health workforce plays a key role in improving quality and safety of healthcare. The formulation of policies and the use of instruments for quality and safety improvement vary widely between the Member States of the European Union. There is plenty of scope for learning between countries from best practices examples.
Europe needs to be able to count on a skilled, engaged and healthy workforce – capable of adjusting to technological change, new patterns of work organization and the emerging needs of patients.
This conference built on good practice available throughout the European Union. Conclusions enabled the development of an European action plan, that will allow health authorities and relevant stakeholders to jointly prepare for mid and long term needs.
