National News

Belgium

EIB Grant for Health Sciences Campus Gasthuisberg

The European Investment Bank (EIB) will grant 325 million euro to K.U. Leuven and UZ Leuven for the construction and completion of the “Health Sciences Campus Gasthuisberg”, a first-class medical and university centre providing acute care, education and research in a single location, “Gasthuisberg” in Leuven. The EIB decided to support the project, considering it as a major initiative in line with the European policies for health, education and innovation.

The project will be a comprehensive centre of excellence, combining acute and specialist hospital services on a single campus together with teaching activities and biomedical research of K.U. Leuven. As such it will also provide a central specialist hospital “hub” within K.U. Leuven hospital network, to offer the highest level of healthcare services to the patients. Through co-location resulting in full integration of healthcare, research and teaching activities, it will ease synergies and allow the achievement of UZ Leuven and K.U. Leuven’s academic and biomedical objectives.

Denmark

International Benchmarking of the Danish Hospital Sector

A recent international benchmarking study, made by the Danish Ministry of Health and Prevention, compares the Danish hospital sector with that of other countries in the following four fields:

Health systems and health status;

Expenditure, personnel, capacity and activity;

The patient and hospital service; and

Use of resources and quality of care.

The benchmarking indicators relate primarily to resources, process, services and effects. For the comparison, seven European countries have been selected: Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and France. In addition, an OECD average is presented where possible. The countries have been selected primarily on the basis of the fact that they are countries with which Denmark naturally compares itself due to geographical closeness and comparable living standards.

Generally, the benchmarking study shows that the Danish hospital sector performs well in most areas compared with the seven countries and with the average of the OECD countries. With respect to Denmark, it should be underlined that access to healthcare is good with relatively short waiting times, and that Denmark has the lowest proportion of citizens who experience unmet needs for medical examination among the countries benchmarked. Moreover Denmark performs relatively more surgical procedures on inpatients than the other countries in the comparison and the average of the OECD, and average length of stay is lower than most at 3.5 days.

Danish patients have well-developed rights and out of the eight countries in the comparison, it is only Denmark that has a generally extended free choice of hospital after one month waiting time.

On the other hand Danes have shorter life expectancy than citizens in the other seven countries and the average of the OECD countries. This is due among other things to lifestyle factors for example high consumption of tobacco and alcohol. Finally, in Denmark, hospital expenditure accounts for 4.3 percent of GDP, whereas the average for the OECD countries is 3.1 percent and between 2.8 – 4.1 in the other seven countries in the comparison. After Norway, Denmark has the highest number of full-time employees at public hospitals per 1,000 population. More information about the study (in English) can be found on: www.sum.dk Asger Hansen

Slovakia

Preparing for E-Health Services

Following an amendment to theHealth Care Act, the Ministry ofHealth of the Republic of Slovakia ispreparing the grounds for a set of ehealthservices to establish a nationalelectronic health system.

The reform of the healthcare system includes services such as the electronic booking of General Practitioners (GPs), GPs' online consultation, health services that are to be provided remotely, electronic prescription forms or vouchers, as well as the issuing of electronic health cards, as from 2013.

The main purpose of the medical electronic cards is to give citizens access to their personal health records via the Internet at any time and place. The electronic health card will contain patient data including information about vaccinations.

The Ministry of Health believe that this electronic health card will store life-saving medical information, "The electronic records will allow doctors around the world to provide healthcare to citizens, via the National Health portal. These medical data will be stored in an electronic health card through which doctors will be able to access them and therefore provide proper medical care even remotely."