The European Commission has published the opinion of the Expert Panel on Effective Ways of Investing in Health on the organisation of resilient health and social care following the COVID-19 pandemic. The opinion identifies the building blocks of resilient health and social care, explores the elements and conditions for capacity building to strengthen health system resilience, addresses healthcare needs of vulnerable patients at times of crisis, and defines a blueprint for resilience testing of health systems.
The recommendations target a number of key areas, including: enhancing workforce training and resilience, reviewing research and development and procurement (especially for innovative medicines), identifying and reducing disinformation, fostering interprofessional and inter-sectoral collaboration with community health workers and informal care givers for example, integrating information and communication technologies across care levels and public health, strengthening primary and mental health care, increasing public health focus on psychological distress, debating methods for Member States to collect and share aggregate health data on ethnicity and socioeconomic status, developing and deploying online trainings for frontline health and social care professionals regarding care provision to vulnerable groups.
Finally, the opinion recommends investing from the European Commission in the development and implementation of:
- Comprehensive resilience testing of health systems that use qualitative and quantitative data collection methodologies to generate meaningful, actionable results for health system transformation;
- Corresponding learning communities within and across Member States to share lessons learned through this process.
For more information, please read the full opinion.
To learn more about our advocacy work in the area of COVID, please visit our thematic page.