Dear colleagues

 

An end of year update -

 

Our report on financial protection in Europe - Can people afford to pay for health care? - is now available in Russian and summaries of the report are available in English, French, German and Spanish (Russian summary to follow shortly).

 

We disseminated the findings of the 2019 report via a range of events and publications this year, including:

• EU Social Protection Committee Indicators Sub-Group, Brussels, 6 February & 20 June
• EU HSPA Expert Group, Valletta, 4 June
• WHO high-level conference on health equity, Tallinn, 11-13 June
• OECD report Health for everyone? Social inequalities in health and health systems (chapter on affordability and financial protection), September
• WHO 2019 global report Primary health care on the road to universal health coverage (chapter on financial protection), September
• The UHC 2030’s Civil Society Engagement Mechanism Reflections on WHO 2019 UHC monitoring report commended our work in Europe for counting further impoverished people and linking financial protection results to data on unmet need for health care, September
• WHO & World Bank Global monitoring report on financial protection in health 2019, September
• European Health Forum Gastein, 2-4 October, where we highlighted findings from the Austria and Estonia country reports
• OECD report Health at a glance 2019 (chapter on access to health care), November
• European Commission State of health in the EU companion report 2019 (chapter on accessibility), December
• European Commission State of health in the EU country profiles (selected countries), December
• WHO Global Meeting to Accelerate Progress on SDG target 3.4 on NCDs and Mental Health, Muscat, 9-12 December
• BMJ Opinion We must change how we measure the impact of health spending on poor people if we are serious about ‘leaving no one behind’, 12 December

 

For those of you in Bangkok in January, we will be at PMAC UHC Forum 2020.

 

Country reviews for Poland, Sweden, Moldova and Ireland are now ready to be published online, with Slovenia soon to follow. Country reviews for Albania, Cyprus, France, Georgia, Greece, the Netherlands, Portugal and Turkey are being updated with more recent data and will be published next year. The findings for Moldova were presented at two high-level policy dialogue events in Chisinau. The findings for Latvia were presented at a high-level meeting in the Latvian parliament.

 

New countries joined the study this year – Belgium, Finland, Luxembourg, North Macedonia, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland – and in 2020 we will include the last remaining EU member states – Bulgaria, Denmark, Italy, Malta and Romania.

 

We are also working towards the publication of a brief on coverage policy to be published in the European Observatory’s policy brief series in 2020 and a second regional report on financial protection in Europe in 2021.

 

We couldn’t have done any of this without your valuable contribution.

 

We’d specially like to highlight the work of our colleagues José Cerezo, Marina Karanikolos, Mary MacLennan, Ilaria Mosca, Erica Richardson and Pooja Yerramilli in editing the country reports; Ruth Oberhauser and Juan García Domínguez in coordinating the production of the reports; and our copy editors Nancy Gravesen, Alex Mathieson and Nicole Satterley. Jorge Alejandro García Ramírez also joined our team this year.

 

With thanks to all of you and good wishes for 2020 -

 

Sarah, Tamás & Jon

 

 

Sarah Thomson

Senior Health Financing Specialist

WHO Barcelona Office for Health Systems Strengthening

 

Can people afford to pay for health care?

New evidence on financial protection in Europe

 

+34 607 072 924