Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-06-07-Speech-2-362"
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"en.20050607.31.2-362"2
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"Mr President, thank you. First of all, I should like to congratulate Mr Bowis on the clarity of his report and of his stance on something that is a live issue.
It is an unfortunate fact that health care is far from ideal in many countries. What is worse, in many countries, questions are being asked about quality and accessibility at a time when waiting lists and waiting times are getting longer. Under normal circumstances, patients benefit from care close to home, in their own countries at any rate. In the situation of reduced quality, it becomes appealing for patients to look across the border.
Recent court judgments have encouraged patients to look elsewhere for an answer to their health problems. I totally agree with the rapporteur’s giving first place to the improvement of quality in health care; shopping across the border does not solve anything. It is, of course, practical to make joint arrangements about transnational treatments in border regions, and the departure of patients to other countries can be an incentive to invest more in national health care, although that is an unwieldy way of stimulating quality. It is therefore unacceptable for patient mobility to be regulated in the Services Directive by way of afterthought, and the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety was right to delete patient mobility from that directive.
We are faced, however, with an urgent problem. There is a considerable difference in quality between the Member States. The varying chances of survival for, for example, bladder cancer are shocking. In Austria and Iceland, the chance of surviving bladder cancer is twice that in Poland. Instead of dreaming up procedures, laws and regulations which should guide the free movement of patients, the Commission would be wiser to invest in the exchange of knowledge in the most dynamic way possible. Patients with bladder cancer in Poland deserve high-quality treatment too. All bladder cancer patients want to benefit from Austrian knowledge and expertise. Let us therefore take this step forward and not invest unnecessarily in mobility that patients do not want anyway. Nobody enjoys waking up from a general anaesthetic in a strange environment. I would therefore speak for quality rather than mobility."@en1
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