CoFoE: EU Coordination in Area of Health to Help Manage Crises, Says Dolinkova
Bratislava, January 20 (TASR) – The creation of a European Health Union (EHU) could be an important step towards providing safer, more accessible and better quality health-care to everyone, but several goals need to be met first, Zuzana Dolinkova of the extra-parliamentary Voice-SD party has told TASR.
Finalising the EHU is among the issues being discussed at the ongoing Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE).
“Partly in the context of the current pandemic situation, I view the vision of coordinated Union action in the area of human health as a possible effective tool for managing health crises and, at the same time, as a potential tool for necessary progress and improving health care in individual member states,” stated Dolinkova.
Dolinkova pointed out that health-care sectors across the EU face a common problem – a shortage of medical staff. “There’s a lack of doctors, nurses, paramedics, orderlies and other health-care workers,” she noted, adding that health care must remain under the exclusive control of individual states.
She stressed the need to set the competitiveness of the health-care sectors of EU-member states in terms of salary, material, educational, scientific, research and innovation conditions. “Medical staff, the most important component in this sector, must be gradually and evenly stabilised mainly via adequate financing,” stated Dolinkova. If this goal is met, the creation of a European Health Union might be an important step towards better health care.
