The Health Management Key Challenge: How do we save European Health Systems?

The search for international consensus on some fundamental interventions is now a key element to foster cooperation to save Europe’s healthcare systems. This premise, though sounding like a dramatic stance, is currently shared by a growing number of policy makers and senior healthcare managers in Europe and beyond. This is the nature of a recent report by the The Economist Intelligence Unit (2011, ‘The Future of Healthcare in Europe’), which is a relevant document for our whole community as it shows the views of a certain segment of healthcare agents and investors. The key challenge and urgent political priority discussed in this report to balance sustainable healthcare national expenditure and budgets with a growing demand for expensive healthcare and related pressure to adopt new expensive technologies, is the current strategic element of a management struggle at both macro and micro levels. These two set of forces are undeniably visible in the large majority of European and northAmerican health systems. The general incapacity to cover costs of healthcare with current public budgets and levels of financing is now assumed as factual. Besides a small number of exceptions, healthcare organizations in Europe face the hardship of controlling and tackling related issues resulting from the trend for costs to soar to ‘impossible’ levels. The expectation that annual healthcare costs in some major European health systems may dangerously grow to well above 15% of public expenditure establishes a clear mindset for contemporary healthcare management priorities. At the same time, political assumptions take a new attitude of skepticism concerning the possibility of sustaining these levels of continuous expenditure growth in healthcare. In other words, there will not be enough money to support current levels of expenditure and budget growth and the traditional political support for a ‘never-ending’ increase of healthcare budgets is fading. What is then the Future for contemporary healthcare management? What are the key issues in which healthcare managers could contribute in the short term? What forces are present in the field to potentiate a balanced development?