Global Health to be a Focus for European Commission

The European Commission has informed EPHA that it is working on a Communication on Global Health. This Communication responds to several different requests from the Council of Ministers and the forthcoming Spanish Presidency of the EU due in the first half of 2010. The Directorate General for Development Cooperation in the European Commission (DG Dev) had been drafting a Communication on “sickness risk coverage and financing health systems” in response to a request from the Council of Ministers (see page 17 of Conclusions of General Affairs and External Relations Council from 10 to 11 November 2008). However, as this issue could not feature amongst discussions chaired by the current Swedish Presidency of the EU during an already full calendar, the Commission has decided to broaden the scope of the Communication so as to respond to a number of other relevant global health issues.

The Department in the Commission that will be taking the lead in the preparations of the Communication will be the Directorate General for Development. Other Departments that will be active and prepare working documents to accompany the Comunication will be the Directorate General for Health and Consumer Affairs and the Directorate General for Research.

The principles that the European Commission has indicated will be central to the Communication are a rights approach to health, equity and universal coverage and democratic governance. A roadmap prepared by the European Commission outlines how these three principles should apply to all EU internal and external actions related to global health:

"EU global health equity: There is a need to increase the collective EU levels (linked with the EU Agenda for Action on MDGs and its post-2010 strategy) and cross-country equity of health Officail Development Assistance (linked with the need to apply the division of labour to key sectors, as health). In parallel, EU health ODA, highly fragmented, needs to increase its level of alignment (as committed in Paris and Accra) behind comprehensive national strategies, based on coordinated and effective health policy dialogue (as recommended by the Court of Auditors). In parallel, the EC will update health and development guidelines in order to further support the EU collective capacity and incidence in the health sector dialogue.

EU global health knowledge: In parallel and coordinated with the challenges and priorities of EU health ODA, EU global health research requires greater levels of health research from and for developing countries, greater equity and pertinence to the priorities in developing countries; improved ownership of the national institutions and participation of civil society and a more structured and effective link with evidence-based decision making; closely linked with the EU challenge of enhanced health sector policy dialogue. The global research funding architecture needs to be harmonised and aligned. Complementary to these principles, the EU will recall the international attention to the global public good for health and call for global investments in the advance of humanity in health, beyond and in addition to development and research efforts."

As part of the preparations for the Communication the Commission will be opening an online consultation probably by the middle of September 2009.