Has Europe learned the lessons of the pandemic? COVID-19 placed frontline workers under intense pressure, and highlighted the hard limits that staff numbers can place on healthcare capacity. Recruiting and retaining a motivated and valued healthcare workforce will be key in building resilience for future crises.

Meanwhile, the pandemic exposed supply chain issues for medical equipment (including ventilators), vaccines, and PPE, as well as hinting at some of the opportunities afforded by new technologies (such as remote consultations). How can EU Member States build more resilient health systems, incorporating smart investment and digitalisation to boost public health?

We put some of YOUR questions on this topic to a panel of experts:

💬 Ingrid Keller, Head of Unit, Health Security, EU Commission

💬 Agata Jakoncic, Managing Director, MSD Greece, Cyprus & Malta

Are Europe’s public health systems ready for the next crisis? Have the right lessons been learned? Are health workers exhausted and burned-out after the pandemic? How can we ensure technological innovation in healthcare won’t be just cost-saving measures and will genuinely improve quality of care? Would more resilient European healthcare systems need shorter medical supply chains? Let us know your thoughts and comments in the form below and we’ll take them to policymakers and experts for their reactions!

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.



63 comments Post a commentcomment

What do YOU think?

  1. avatar
    EU-Reform Proactive

    Another move to convince us that only EU treaty politics can guarantee the best public medical care in Euroland. How caring!

    Based on the following EU legalities:
    Article 168 (protection of public health), Article 114 (single market) and Article 153 (social policy) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).

    Although- quote:

    „Primary responsibility for health protection and, in particular, healthcare systems continues to lie with the Member States”. Not enough?

    Further- “However, the EU has an important(?) role to play in improving public health, preventing and managing diseases, mitigating sources of danger to human health, and harmonising health strategies between Member States.”

    https://www.europarl.europa.eu/factsheets/en/sheet/49/public-health

    One should ask:

    • Why do we need to give the EU a wider (“IMPORTANT?”) competence in health matters resulting in additional and expensive bureaucratic EU processes & law-making “to protect and improve, support the modernisation and digitalisation, equip EU countries to better prevent and address future pandemics”- what is already a world-class system and stressing national budgets.

    • Surely, the 27 EU Members are not dummies or clueless should they wish to improve their National health systems! Funded anyways from their national tax base.

    • Should, however- the EU experts or the EU sponsored Think Tanks know how to improve the national health systems- without:

    * occurring more national debt by borrowing from the EU money- Lords- or cutting favourable deals with global pharmaceuticals & global IT’s- creating more billionaires- or without:

    • capturing more national competences- then please provide and submit first a detailed costing of such a vague objective/idea for consideration to all 27 parliaments.

    Which government wouldn’t take up any interesting proposal where their taxpayers could score on quality- or even save money to reduce their debt burden?

    And please remember- no order to go ahead- before a valid quote has been approved by all 27 Members! Thank you.

  2. avatar
    George

    we should have learned that EU has been making more problems, than solving!

  3. avatar
    Emanuel

    Event 201 by Bill Gates covers all that and much more

  4. avatar
    Johannes

    Please stop wasting our money

    • avatar
      Andrew

      That’s the point. Ill health costs the common weal so much in comparison to preventative care that NOT investing in health is wasting your money.

    • avatar
      Johannes

      Best. Joke. Ever. 🤡🤡🤡

    • avatar
      Andrew

      You don’t have to believe me. Please take the time to compare the costs of health care versus the cost to the economy of not investing in health care.

    • avatar
      Johannes

      It’s fairly obvious. Take whatever vaccine and you loose your bet 😃 If you literally take it, you’ll loose your health…

    • avatar
      Andrew

      oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know that your viewpoint was anti-science as well as anti-economics and anti-mathematics. Good luck with that.

    • avatar
      Johannes

      I would be so happy when vax honks would care to base their ideology on actual science.. seems too much to ask, and guess what, it actually is to much to ask given that anyone can see it just can’t work. Well, I at least think that, and so am not surprised that it doesn’t work 🤡🥸🥸🥸

  5. avatar
    Filip

    Defund European Bureaucratic Monster!

  6. avatar
    Werner

    Already got my comment deleted ? Proves to show the pandemic is dwarfed by a profound institutional sickness.

    • avatar
      Werner

      and… it’s back again. Thank you.

  7. avatar
    Kat Len

    Could please tell us what or who finance your Debating Europe ? thanks.

    • avatar
      Rudy

      Kat Len Who do you think?
      The ones that want to give us the illusion we have anything to say in it.

  8. avatar
    Adam

    The virological pandemic of that time in 2020 was already finished in May 2020, after seventy/70 days like áll viruses, confirmed by the Dutch government: ‘R.I.V.M.’ and the former French State Expert, Toxicologist-Pharmacologist Prof.Dr.Ir. Fourtillan(°1943). Since thát date, the “pandemic of the idiots” started, till today…

  9. avatar
    Sasole

    This could only work if all supplier companies were non profit organisations.

    • avatar
      Penny

      true non profits!

    • avatar
      Johan

      that does not matter.

    • avatar
      Sasole

      why?

    • avatar
      Johan

      profit margins are about the same as in other industries.

    • avatar
      Sasole

      But if someone makes profite, he tries to sell more than necessary.

    • avatar
      Johan

      name a better business model.

    • avatar
      Sasole

      No, we are talking about that health care should get the money it needs and this will not work if someone is draining this money into his pocket.

  10. avatar
    Marian

    Rot op met Europa liever er uit

  11. avatar
    Sergey

    yes the Europe’s public health systems is so well organised that it is ready to kill all of us in the next crisis

  12. avatar
    Helen

    No, absolutely not in the EU country I live in. When patients have to wait 8 months to 12 more for diagnosis of acute health issues, it indirectly encourages patients to resort to private healthcare. My personal opinion is that such prolonged waits are politically motivated.

    How can such a system be ready for the next crisis?

  13. avatar
    Johan

    Eliminate single points of failure, like the WHO.

  14. avatar
    Andrew

    I agree. Not investing in the health of all EU citizens is the actual expenditure. It’s a cost-by-neglect.

    • avatar
      Rudy

      Investing in health means that you invest in the number of beds in hospitals and training and hiring medical staff, invest in the quality of your hospitals. It does NOT mean spending billions of taxpayer money to buy unapproved and experimental vaccines that are not realy vaccines but gene therapy.

  15. avatar
    Penny

    Judge Recarey posed a series of questions to government officials and Pfizer regarding the chemical composition, efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines, and required Pfizer to state whether it has “admitted, in any area, internal or external to it and its partners, the verification of adverse effects” of its COVID-19 vaccines in children. From children’s health defence

  16. avatar
    Björn

    Socialism is destroying health care.

    • avatar
      Rudy

      False, it’s corporate greed that has been corrupting our entire medical world since farmaceutical compagnies took over from and eliminated natural remedies and medicines at the beginning of the last century.

    • avatar
      Björn

      No it isn’t. If it were just corporate greed, anybody could start a nicer corporation that just wants to help. For example you – you seem to care a lot, so certainly you wouldn’t be greedy, or would you?
      The truth is that out Western health care systems are devolving more or less into socialist planning economies, which means the allocation of resources doesn’t work and things deteriorate over time.

    • avatar
      Rudy

      I recomend reading into the history of farmaceutical industry. And not just the pure medical part, look into the financial part of that history where John D. Rockefeller created the farmaceutical industry and eradicated natural remedies. All out of greed.
      https://youtu.be/PmorPPJqVCc?t=3

    • avatar
      Björn

      How can you eradicate natural remedies? Since they are natural, they should still be around and available?
      Of course individual companies can be greedy, but without socialism, people wouldn’t be forced to do business with them.
      Watched half of your video, and it says “Congress accepted the proposals and medical schools now had to teach allopathic medicine” – so even if that theory was correct, it was still the government intervention. However, it is rather silly. The problem of modern medicine is not that we can’t use natural remedies anymore. There are many illnesses that have no natural remedies. And also many illnesses can now be cured that had no known cure at the time of Rockefeller.
      There are issues with big pharma, but again they go back to the government protecting their business by making it extremely expensive to bring new remedies to market.

  17. avatar
    Rudy

    When you are talking with terms like cost and investement you are talking the language of business, this is corporate talk.The citizens health has become big business, a giant source of revenue. There are no patients, there are only customers.Lesson 1 for any medical professional = A cured patient is a lost client.The pandemic was a planned and well organised marketing campaign to get as many clients as possible for their gene therapy, their unapproved and experimental gene therapy. Big Pharma has made many billions in profits thanx to that planned and well organised plandemic.

  18. avatar
    Rob

    just throw out the entire europe

  19. avatar
    Bronisław

    Well, do you mean there seems to be a chance that doctors will be seeing patients for more than the present 5-10 minutes allocated per visit?

  20. avatar
    Sabine

    Germany should Stop closing down hospitals and Intensiv care units. I thought it was the worst pandemic ever in 2020 !Time to wake up to the scam

  21. avatar
    Dag

    You mean ready for the next CREATED crisis ! EU and globalism stinks !

  22. avatar
    Dag

    PCR tests for virus is basically a fraudulent procedur, according to the inventor of these tests they are not meant for this purpose its very easy to create a false result ,, so why do the people in power still use them , to create more “cases” of course

    • avatar
      Juul

      what do you know about PCR, and why is it not meant for this purpose?

  23. avatar
    Chris

    India Health care is free !! It’s a shame to make business with people in need.

    • avatar
      Iwona

      in Europe it’s free as well, but that means it is funded from taxes, and this in turn means it can still be underfunded, and frequently is.

    • avatar
      Chris

      for me it’s not free, just price reduction only. We are leaving in a debtocracy, money is unlimited, fake, with no counter-part, it can not be underfunded. This debts are virtuel and artificially made, to believed we owe this money. 😉

  24. avatar
    Omer

    eurocrats… the sooner the better we shall get rid of those scroungers !!!

  25. avatar
    Lili

    I think we learned a lot from covid pandemi. It was quite slowly in the beginning…

    • avatar
      Arnaud

      What lessons do you think we have learned?

    • avatar
      Lili

      We learned that we were not prepared in fact for a pandemi emotionally and with enough medical capacity…
      We have to be prepared from all points of views, because they are very unpredictable!
      And this one is not yet all gone…

  26. avatar
    Olivier

    don t interfere you don t do better than our government and as much corrupted by lobbies

  27. avatar
    Lydia

    Next Crisis????? What about what we are going through NOW????

  28. avatar
    JT HK

    If the US and China are suffering from drug shortage for COVID, Europe of course not ready for the next crisis. It is better for Europe to take serious precaution when drug shortage has been announced.

  29. avatar
    JT HK

    European people must be warned of the tripledemic surges as in the US.

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