On 9 June 2023, the European Commission hosted the Stakeholders’ Conference in Brussels and online. The event focused on important health priorities and offered an opportunity to reflect on priorities, strategic orientations, and future work programs.
Three initiatives of interest among the previous and current projects featured are highlighted below:
- The OECD report on Integrating Care to Prevent and Manage Chronic Diseases
- The OECD Guidebook on Best Practices in Public Health
- The OECD report on Healthy Eating and Active Lifestyles
Integrating Care to Prevent and Manage Chronic Diseases (2023)
Care fragmentation is a key issue for people with complex health needs. People with complex health needs, such as patients with a chronic condition, require care from different providers across multiple healthcare settings. Without proper care integration, people may try to address their unmet needs using excessive services in an uncoordinated manner. Not only does this worsen their experience, it is also dangerous and costly, with estimates showing fragmented care increases costs by over EUR 4 000 per patient. Countries are experimenting with integrated models of care in response to the growing number of people living with complex health needs who are at risk of receiving fragmented care. Such models of care provide continuous, co-ordinated, high-quality care over a person’s life.
This report examines 13 integrated care models implemented in OECD and EU27 countries using a validated performance assessment framework. Selected case studies cover a wide range of integrated care models ranging from small pilots operating at the city level to nationwide programmes covering entire populations. Key findings and policy recommendations outlined in this report will help countries deliver integrated care to patients with complex health needs. Findings and recommendations cover the key dimensions of integrated care, namely governance, financing, the workforce, and digital tools and health information systems. In addition, the report covers monitoring and evaluation, health equality, and scaling-up and transferability.
The report is accessible to read at the following LINK.
Guidebook on Best Practices in Public Health (2022)
Countries face a range of public health challenges brought about by changes in lifestyle behaviours, environments, patterns of disease and population structure. These include increasing rates of non-communicable diseases and mental ill-health, air pollution and the rise of emerging infectious diseases such as antimicrobial resistance. Many of these trends worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular mental ill-health and physical inactivity as a result of measures designed to reduce contact between people. For example, prevalence of anxiety and depression more than doubled during the pandemic among OECD countries with available data.
This OECD guidebook assists policy makers in addressing the greatest public health challenges by outlining the process for selecting, implementing and evaluating public health interventions. Such interventions may include health promotion actions delivered by primary care and other health care professionals, health literacy programs as well as policies to transform the environment in which people live. Real-world experiences from member countries appear throughout the document to support theoretical frameworks that underpin the guidebook.
The report is accessible to read at the following LINK.
Healthy Eating and Active Lifestyles (2022)
Overweight and obesity has a significant health and economic impact, and countries have responded to high rates of overweight with national action plans, which are the basis for different policies and interventions. This report examines a selection of high-priority overweight prevention interventions implemented in OECD and EU27 countries: twelve interventions including food-labelling schemes, lifestyle counselling programmes, community- and school-based programmes, as well as mHealth apps were selected for analysis. Each intervention was examined against a common set of frameworks – specifically, an assessment of the intervention against several best practice criteria including effectiveness, efficiency and equity, and second, an assessment to determine the transferability of the intervention.
Countries can implement five main policy recommendations to improve their response to high rates of overweight: create comprehensive policy packages; target the needs of disadvantaged groups; boost participation in weight reduction programmes; adequately resource transfer and scale-up efforts; provide incentives that strengthen evidence-based research. These are the areas the report focuses on.
The report is accessible to read at the following LINK.
