Last 21 September, Health ministers of eight new Member States (Cyprus, Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovak Republic and Slovenia), as well as Austria, Greece and Italy, set up a Steering Group of health ministers to cooperate more closely in the field of health and social care.
The so-called "Prague Declaration" was signed in the presence of representatives of the World Health Organisation (WHO). Please find it attached at the end of this article.
In this Declaration, the group of health ministers commits, in particular, to the following:
fully endorsing the conditions for mutual recognition of the qualifications of health workers and ensuring the free movement of persons and services, as well as introducing a system for the registration of healthcare workers;
improving the coordination of organs available for transplantation by connecting transplant centres to national and international databases of those in need of transplants;
intensifying national efforts to implement health promotion policies and prevention programmes against smoking, alcohol and drug abuse;
expediting the implementation of national legislation in order to avoid any major conflict with EU law at the time of accession;
recommending that EU finances are set aside for special healthcare programmes to discourage patients from shopping around for healthcare treatment as this puts an extra burden on national health resources;
establishing a Steering Group of health ministers with a rotating presidency, to be held by the Czech Republic until the end of 2004.
