OECD - Health at a Glance: Europe 2016

Ensuring universal access to quality care demands greater efforts to improve the effectiveness, accessibility and resilience of health systems in all EU countries. This new edition of Health at a Glance: Europe stresses that more should be done to improve the health of populations in EU countries and, in particular, to reduce inequalities in access and quality of services. This is necessary to achieve more inclusive economic growth and to deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular SDG 3 to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.

We need more effective health systems. Policy action is needed to reduce the number of people dying prematurely and increase the number of years that people live in good health. Public health policies and the quality of care have undoubtedly improved over the past two decades, contributing to steady gains in life expectancy. In most EU countries, people can now expect to live beyond the age of 80, a gain of six years on average since the early 1990s. Moreover, the proportion of people dying after being admitted to hospital after a heart attack has dropped by nearly 40% across EU countries over the past decade alone. Yet, despite these gains, in 2013 more than 1.2 million people in EU countries died from a range of communicable and non-communicable diseases, as well as injuries that could have been avoided through better public health and prevention policies and the provision of more effective health care. Many lives could be saved if the standards of care were raised to the best level across EU countries.

Globally, one of the health-related targets of the SDGs is to reduce the number of premature deaths due to non-communicable diseases (NCDs). This report looks at the impact that NCDs have not only on peoples health, but also on the economy in terms of lower labour market participation and productivity. NCDs lead to the premature death of more than 550 000 people of working age each year across EU countries, resulting in the loss of 3.4 million potentially productive life years. This amounts to an annual loss of EUR 115 billion for EU economies, a figure which does not even include the loss from the lower employment rates and the lower productivity of people living with such chronic conditions.

Broad and coherent strategies are needed to address the many socioeconomic determinants of health and risk factors that are leading to many chronic diseases and premature deaths, particularly among disadvantaged groups. Notable progress has been achieved in reducing tobacco consumption in most EU countries, through a mix of public awareness campaigns, regulations and taxation. Still, more than one in five adults in EU countries continues to smoke every day. It is also crucial to step up efforts to tackle obesity and the harmful use of alcohol. More than one in five adults in EU countries report drinking heavily on a regular basis. And one in six adults across EU countries is obese, up from one in nine in 2000. Greater efforts are needed to tackle these major public health issues.