Cross Border Healthcare - your urgent action needed

Dear ECPC Members,

Ideally, cancer patients across EU should receive all high quality healthcare as close to home and their families as possible. The need for travelling abroad for is the exception and only required under specific circumstances. Nevertheless, in some cases, cancer patients do need to travel in order to have the chance to survive. In supporting patients day to day, patient advocates see cases where patients are suffering and dying because they are not admitted to access treatment, e.g. clinical trials, in other EU Member States.

The principles of quality and safety in healthcare - which included a commitment on cross-border healthcare - were endorsed by all EU governments in June 2006 in the EU's Council Conclusions. However, the draft Directive for Cross Border Healthcare was stopped by the EU Council of Health Ministers in 2009 mainly due to fears about its financial impact. The Member States that were against the proposal included: Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Ireland and Slovenia. However, experts estimate that the financial impact of cross-border healthcare would be very limited.

Presently, discussions are again underway to convince the remaining Member States to support Cross Border Health Care. However still there are number of stumbling blocks. The most important decision taken about the progress on Cross-Border Healthcare will be in the meeting of EU Health Ministers in June 2010.

Without requests from their citizens, chances are quite low that the health ministers will agree on something that helps cancer patients. We are convinced that to reach political agreement, some support from the cancer patient community is needed! We urgently need your support to make the cancer patients' voice heard!

Can you please support us in lobbying for Cross Border Healthcare in your country, and help us to provide real examples?

Send a letter to your health minister. ECPC is encouraging you to lobby your government (health ministers) and defend these priorities. To make this easier for you, we are attaching  a Draft letter to the Health Minister. We would encourage you to send it to your minister by the 3rd week of May 2010, and follow-up with the ministry afterwards.

Provide examples where cross border healthcare failed. Influencing policy works best if real stories can be quoted where cancer patients were not able to access life-saving treatment in another country. You would help us greatly if you could bring ECPC in touch with patients from different Member States that tried successfully or unsuccessfully to go to another EU Member State to receive cancer treatment. We are attaching a short questionnaire to these patients.

For your further information we are attaching:

• A background brief on cross-border healthcare (download only for registered ECPC members)
  
• A draft letter for your health minister, for your free use (download only for registered ECPC members)
• A questionnaire for patients that had challenges accessing cross-border treatment - please fill out our questionnaire in MS Word or our web questionnaire
  

Your help and support would be greatly appreciated. Together we can lobby for a change!

Please get in touch with us if you have any question and we'll be happy to discuss, or if you feel we can help you directly taking this forward in your country.

Best regards,
Jan Geissler, ECPC Director
Denis Horgan, ECPC Political Affairs Manager