Importance of a strengthened cooperation in the health sector
Published : Thursday 16 July 2015 - Macarena Nuño, IPEMED's project officer
Improving access to cheap quality healthcare for all, in a context of restricted financial, and even human, resources: here is the challenge that northern and southern Mediterranean countries must take up.
The current demographic, epidemiological, organisational and democratic transitions are leading North African countries to implement significant structural reforms. With the economic and social crisis, the slow return of growth, the decrease in labour force and population ageing, northern Mediterranean countries (and especially of southern Europe) must also question their model.
The reinforcement of cooperation in the region, especially in western Mediterranean, could help finding common answers to shared challenges. Here lies the interest of the 5+5 Dialogue, an informal cooperation system launched in 1990, which has been growing over the last few years, maybe thanks to its flexibility and to the implication of fewer countries (five northern countries: Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Malta and five southern countries: Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya), than for other current regional dynamics.
In the health sector, the 5+5 Dialogue is not official yet - no meeting of concerned Ministers - but this did not prevent local ministerial agents to meet, share a diagnosis, identify common interest subjects and start exchanging experiences. This was done in order to prepare the ground for the launching of this new imminent cooperation.
Here are a few subjects of interest: production and legislation of medicines, especially of generic ones, pharmacovigilance, innovation and medical biotechnologies, health safety, and of course, financing of health systems and implementation of a universal health cover.
And this is urgent because, while they are waiting for this cooperation to be made official, countries are looking for success stories elsewhere. For instance, in March, Morocco organised the International Symposium on universal health cover. Two days of exchanges to reflect on how to improve the RAMED (Medical Assistance Scheme for the Economically Underprivileged), three years after its implementation. Along with international organisations (WHO, EU), experts from Brazil, Thailand, Turkey and Mexico came to present experiences that could lead to a differentiated health cover according to resources, with a restrictive choice of cares. A kind of two-tiered health system.
Given the challenges to take up, the similarity of North African health systems and the complementarity that could be developed in western Mediterranean, a strengthened collaboration in the health sector along with a strong political leadership could lead to new health systems, based on solidarity, allowing cheap quality healthcare for all.
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