“It’s the wrong ques­ti­on to ask if we shall trans­form or not. We will trans­form, whe­ther we like it or not, sim­ply becau­se of the limits to eco­no­mic growth and the resour­ce cons­traints that will be the­re. We are alre­a­dy overst­ret­ching boun­da­ries — and we need to anti­ci­pa­te.” — Rem­co van de Pas

For the fourth edi­ti­on of our Pla­ne­ta­ry Health Dia­lo­gues in ear­ly May 2023, we loo­ked at how future health sys­tems in the EU should look like to meet the needs of peo­p­le and the pla­net in ‘post-growth’ eco­no­mies. For this we invi­ted Euro­He­alth­Net’s Direc­tor Caro­li­ne Cos­tongs to dis­cuss with Dr Rem­co van de Pas, Seni­or Rese­ar­cher at CPHP, and our Direc­tor Mai­ke Voss the bar­riers to trans­for­ma­ti­on and what EU count­ries can and should learn from each other?

Health care sys­tems will be under incre­asing pres­su­re in the future: demand for health care ser­vices will rise due to demo­gra­phic deve­lo­p­ments and the con­se­quen­ces of envi­ron­men­tal cri­ses; at the same time, the health care sys­tem is gui­ded in par­ti­cu­lar by eco­no­mic inte­rests and less by a socio-eco­lo­gi­cal trans­for­ma­ti­on.

Our key takea­ways from this Pla­ne­ta­ry Health Dia­lo­gue: It is evi­dent that sys­tems will chan­ge – whe­ther we like it or not. Now we need to actively shape the requi­red trans­for­ma­ti­on a plan­ned, demo­cra­tic, equi­ta­ble and sus­tainable way. We need a para­digm shift in health care by buil­ding nar­ra­ti­ves across sec­tors.

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