Transforming health systems for resilience: access, workforce and digital

Friday, 20 May 2022 (10:00-11:30 CET)

One lesson coming from the COVID-19 pandemic is that health systems have a central role addressing the crisis. Besides the pandemic, Europe is ingulfed by a perma-crisis including: a raging war, large refugee movements and growing finance and budgetary concerns. Therefore, countries will need to strengthen the resilience of their health systems to withstand the challenge.

In this webinar we will take lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic on how to build back better by transforming health systems towards improved resilience.

The event kicks off the last day of the European Public Health Week 2022, dedicated to ‘building resilient health systems’. We will address three dimensions critical to resilience:

1. We have seen reduced access through postponed diagnosis and treatments resulting in massive backlogs. But we have also seen successful efforts setting up new entry points like fever clinics and better mechanisms for reaching out to hard-to-reach groups.

2. The health workforce has been extremely agile; adapting to the challenge although physical, social and mental protection of health workers was not always given. Persisting shortages and inadequate skill-mix have not helped making crisis response sustainable.

3. We have seen a massive digital uptake during the pandemic, most notably telemedicine. But the use of digital solutions between regions, professions and countries remains uneven and progress made might be reversed.

This webinar builds on the lessons drawn from COVID-19 health system responses which have laid bare key challenges to, and deficiencies of, European health systems, as well as on the ongoing work assessing their level of resilience.

PROGRAMME

Opening remarks:
Josep Figueras, European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies

Resilience policies and strategies:
Natasha Azzopardi-Muscat, WHO Regional Office for Europe
Maya Matthews, European Commission

Expert panel discussion:
Anna Odone, European Public Health Association (EUPHA) Digital Health Section
Ewout van Ginneken, Anna Sagan & Matthias Wismar, European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies

Interaction with the audience:
Facilitators: Suszy Lessof and Erica Richardson, European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies

Special remarks about the European Public Health Week:
Maaike Droogers, European Public Health Association (EUPHA)

[violavalz]

I liked this topic. Can only imagine how interesting the conversations after were.