New European Commission health studies planned for 2016 and 2017

The European Commission’s health directorate, DG Santé, is planning to publish new member state health system assessments this November and next in a "State of Health in the EU" series compiled by OECD and European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies.

The reports will include data on public health performance, the effectiveness of various health technologies and patient outcomes, and will look at the way countries handle chronic diseases, alcohol abuse and primary care.

A revised version of the OECD’s ‘Health at a Glance’ study will be published in November this year. A set of 28 country health profiles, developed by the OECD and the Observatory, is foreseen for the following November. These will provide additional data and indicators, and zoom in on the particular characteristics and challenges of each member state.  

Accompanying this report will be the Commission’s own analysis, which will attempt to draw out common policy implications.

EU countries will then be invited to discuss the evidence with the Commission, the OECD and the Observatory, with the hope that it could help member states pick up best practices from each other.

While the EU has commissioned comparative health reports in the past, officials at Santé think this series can deliver greater country-to-country consistency than has been possible up to now.

The reports come at a time when member states face “unprecedented pressure to evolve [and] modernise”, their healthcare systems, according to the Commission.

It is not within the Commission’s legal power to tell member-states how to run their healthcare systems and that is not the goal of the reports, the Director General for Health and Food Safety, Xavier Prats Monné, told Science|Business in an interview in December.

“It’s about being useful and supporting states as they look to modernise their health systems. There’s no conspiracy to take away any powers from the member states,” he said.