Prevention measures in health systems more urgent than ever, say experts

Description

At the 2022 EIT Summit in Stockholm, Dr Claudia Pagliari led an expert panel on "Next-generation health and human-centered innovation". A key theme was the need for more user-centred approaches, drawing on social and behavioural science, to help optimise preventive health care.  This article in the pan-European policy journal EURACTIV draws on these themes, quoting the participants. Extract below:

Rapid changes have happened in the field of health since the COVID-19 pandemic, and the need to focus on prevention has become even more apparent, according to health stakeholders. The current focus of the healthcare sector is learning lessons from two and a half years of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to better prepare the EU and its health systems for the future. Yet, experts suggest that we may have to change our whole approach to health and healthcare to set ourselves up for future challenges properly.

“We saw, earlier in the pandemic, failures to adequately take into account social and community factors, particularly behavioural factors, which meant that we weren’t as good at predictive models as we might have been,” said Claudia Pagliari, director of Global eHealth at the University of Edinburgh at the EIT Health Summit this week.  "For example, contact tracing apps were unpopular with citizens because of privacy concerns. If everyone had trusted the apps and downloaded them, they could have effectively reduced infection rates, but failing to consider people’s fears severely limited their effectiveness...That is one example of how putting people at the centre of health and including social factors could be a benefit", Pagliari argued.