Adoption of New EU Global Health Strategy
Publication of new strategy to guide EU action for ensuring better preparedness and response to health threats.
The European Commission has adopted a new EU Global Health Strategy to ‘improve global health security and deliver better health for all in a changing world’. It offers a framework for EU health policies leading up to 2030. It sets policy priorities and guiding principles to shape global health, and it identifies concrete lines of action. It outlines what the Commission will do and what it invites Member States to do, each strictly within their respective competences and institutional roles.
The Strategy puts forward three key interrelated priorities in dealing with global health challenges:
- Deliver better health and well-being of people across the life course.
- Strengthen health systems and advance universal health coverage.
- Prevent and combat health threats, including pandemics, applying a One Health approach.
The Strategy also seeks to regain the ground lost to reach the universal health-related targets in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, stressing the importance of addressing important drivers of ill health such as climate change and environmental degradation, food security, conflict, and other humanitarian crises.
High Representative/Vice-President Josep Borrell said:
‘Today, global health features among the priorities of the EU’s external action agenda. Health is no longer limited to a scientific and medical issue. It has become a critical element of foreign, security and trade policies, as well as a key area of international cooperation. As such, it requires determined action on the global stage, based on a collective approach and the promotion of multilateral solutions.
‘I will strongly support the EU global health agenda through different tools of the Common Foreign Security Policy, including the political dialogues we have with our partners worldwide. The European External Action Service and the EU Delegations will be instrumental to the effective implementation of this new Strategy.’
(This report was the subject of a RESEARCHconnect Newsflash.)