Technology top threat to health services

EXPENSIVE new technology — and not an ageing population — is the greatest threat to countries being able to afford decent health services, according to a major new report.

But unless Ireland and other EU states keep their ageing populations healthy, their economies risk becoming poor, the report warns.

Drawn up over the past year by an international team of specialists under the chairmanship of former European Parliament president, Pat Cox, it says countries must analyse how to get the best health services for their money.

Money was being thrown at health services throughout Europe, but few countries really knew if this was buying them efficient and good patient care, said Mr Cox in launching the report in Strasbourg yesterday.

“To sustain and improve healthcare quality in Eur-ope, we need to focus as much on spending wisely as on spending more. Our report is looking at the ‘spending wisely’ part,” said Mr Cox.

“Europe needs to shift the gear from analysis to action in healthcare financing. We need to debunk the dangerous and delusory myth that ageing explains a large part of the growth in healthcare expenditure: the issues that really matter are technological development and to view health spending as an investment. Just as poor health results in poor growth, positive health outcomes are linked with strong economic growth.”

The amount of money in real terms that Ireland has spent on health services in the past 30 years has increased by 680%, which is the third highest in the EU15, though the country comes last in its spending as a percentage of its GDP.

Mr Cox said he was shocked at how little research has been carried out into the effects of different health policies and the money spent on them. Much of the analysis being used is from the US, and he questioned how relevant this was to Europe.

Research by a range of medical and economic bodies, including the World Bank, for the report suggested that Europe’s ageing population would not be the major influence on how much Europe spends on healthcare in the future.

The report points out that in Europe generally, how much a person costs the health service does not depend on their age as much as on how close to death they are.

“New technology, including new forms of drugs, will be the main increased cost facing Europe’s healthcare services in the future,” Mr Cox said.

As a result, he argued, every country should have a Health Technology Assessment Unit to measure the link between actual healthcare needs and innovation.

This would identify treatments that had become obsolete or irrelevant and that should be eliminated, as well as safeguard those that were effective and cost-efficient.

Doctors should use information technology to create a file on each patient and their treatment that would be available to other professionals seeing the patient.

There also needed to be more emphasis on preventing illness, which was closely linked to the economic health of a country, he said.