The Council of health ministers (Health EPSCO), where the Hungarian delegation was led by Károly Czibere minister of state, provided opportunity for Dr. Miklós Szócska,Hungarian candidate for World Health Organization Director General to present his programme. Mr. Szócska highlighted that in his vision the following elements have special focus:
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The importance of European leadership in WHO - Europe is a place where we fought back communicable diseases, and member states developed solidarity based universal health systems. These values should be defended at global level. To lead the World’s only independent global health organisation, the European Union needs someone with strong representation of European public health and health system values, he said.
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The importance of pandemic preparedness and universal health coverage - According to Mr. Szócska we need more agility, more pragmatism, and global mobilisation for pandemic preparedness - and we have to start the long process to elaborate future mechanisms for global risk sharing, as the costs of one day global rundown of the world from pandemics can be measured only with the costs of one day global rundown of war or terrorism. WHO should also work agilely on spreading universal health coverage to ensure basic community services that prevent pandemics and poverty.
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The importance of change for WHO - The Hungarian Candidate also highlighted that WHO needs profound organizational change, more transparency towards donors and we have to develop change management capacities for exercising better interventions. He recognized that new business models are needed for ensuring access to high priced medications and to develop our defence for AMR. Mobile, ehealth and wearable device technologies in the 21th century will have a disruptive role like vaccination had in the 20th. These very cost efficient technologies can take health, diagnostics and care where it did not exist before.
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The importance of WHO as global change agent for health - The biggest killers are not communicable diseases anymore, but chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs). For fighting NCDs that are challenging the sustainability of our health systems with the burden of disease, we spend only 2% of the voluntary contributions that accord 80% of the budget of WHO. This should also change.
At the Council meeting delegations discussed the future involvement of health ministers in the semester process, where Hungary is convinced that health ministers should be able to monitor semester related discussions.
The Hungarian government is also looking forward to the Commission reports on pharmaceutical innovation incentives, on the evaluation of the paediatric medicines regulation as well as the report on the nutrition labelling issues in connection with alcoholic drinks.
The Commission announced the imminent start of the European Reference Network in which Hungary sees a great potential from the perspective of providing better health care for patients suffering from rare or low prevalence complex diseases.
We congratulate the Slovak Presidency who managed to generate EU level debate on relevant issues like medicines shortages, and we wish all the best to the coming Maltese Presidency who is going to table important public health topics such as childhood obesity.
