European partnership for improving health, equity and wellbeing.
EuroHealthNet is the Partnership of Public Health bodies building a healthier future for all by addressing the determinants of health and reducing inequalities. Our focus is on preventing disease and promoting good health by looking within and beyond the health care system.
We work on Public Health and social equity for policy, practice, and research. We also explore and strengthen the links between them. Our approach focuses on health in all policies, reducing health inequalities gaps and gradients, working on determinants across the life course, contributing to sustainability and wellbeing of people and planet.
Fit For the Future
Like all health organisations, our work and the daily life of EuroHealthNet has been greatly changed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our focus has been on addressing the unequal effects of the pandemic. We also looked at the wider and long-term consequences on social and economic life, and how they will interact with health in the future.
EuroHealthNet’s approach and philosophy – a focus on health determinants and health inequalities – has equipped the organisation with the expertise for this analysis. For a number of years, we have examined how to make health systems more sustainable by strengthening health promotion and prevention and anticipating future developments. This has helped prepare us to analyse the changes being brought about now by the pandemic, and support members prepare for the changes to come.
EuroHealthNet is helping to build health and care systems fit for the future. Those systems will be sustainable, equitable, community-based and health promoting and connected. They value and prioritise creating and maintaining good health as much as treating disease. Health, social, education, employment and environmental systems are connected to allow people to live healthily and independently for longer.
In this last year we have seen how the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the world. It put health and social policy front and centre of everybody’s consciousness and lives. It became clear that the virus and the policy measures taken to contain it, were hitting the more and most vulnerable members of our societies the hardest. People with – in many cases preventable, underlying health conditions – were also more likely to suffer from COVID-19.
The pandemic, or syndemic, has clearly and dramatically exposed the issues that are at the core of EuroHealthNet’s work; the centrality of health in our societies, the wide range of factors that affect health, and the pervasiveness of health inequalities. The pandemic came in the context of a more chronic environmental crisis, and amidst technological and demographic changes. The unprecedented recovery response, and the high number of proposals under the European ‘Green Deal’, the European Health Union, and the action plan for the European Pillar on Social Rights demonstrate that there are opportunities to “Build Back Better and Fairer”. These developments also highlight the relevance of EuroHealthNet’s ‘Health Equity in All Policies’ approach, and how working in a wide range of policy areas and across disciplines is vital to delivering health and reducing health inequities.
Read more here.
Published in GI-Mail 06/2021 (English edition).
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