Today, the Commission adopted a new EU Global Health Strategy to improve global health security and deliver better health for all in a changing world. With the Strategy, the EU deepens its leadership and reasserts its responsibility for tackling key global challenges and health inequalities head-on: the unfinished agenda in global health and combatting health threats in the age of pandemics.
The Strategy positions global health as an essential pillar of EU external policy, a critical sector geopolitically and central to EU strategic autonomy. It promotes sustainable, meaningful partnerships of equals drawing on the Global Gateway. As the external dimension of the European Health Union, the strategy is designed to guide EU action for ensuring better preparedness and response to health threats in a seamlessly way.
A new approach to tackling global challenges
The Strategy puts forward three key interrelated priorities in dealing with global health challenges:
The Strategy seeks to regain the ground lost to reach the universal health-related targets in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. To do so, the strategy refocuses our action on achieving universal health coverage, strengthening primary health care, and tackling the root causes of ill-health like poverty and social inequalities. The strategy stresses the importance of addressing important drivers of ill health such as climate change and environmental degradation, food security, conflict, and other humanitarian crises. Therefore, the Strategy introduces a robust “health-in-all-policies” approach to ensure that a wide variety of policies genuinely contribute to health goals. It identifies three key enablers for better health, namely digitalisation, research, and a skilled labour force with concrete actions to advance globally in these areas
The Strategy also seeks to improve global health security, thus protecting citizens from threats by stepping up prevention, preparedness and response, and early detection. These threats can be chemical, biological, or nuclear — or pandemics, including the silent killer that is antimicrobial resistance. The Strategy suggests a wide variety of actions to address these threats:
As a new global health order is emerging, the Strategy sets the way for the EU to contribute to shaping it through a more strategic, assertive, and effective engagement by:
Background
The new EU Global Health Strategy offers a framework for EU health policies leading up to 2030. It sets policy priorities and guiding principles to shape global health, and it identifies concrete lines of action. It outlines what the Commission will do and what it invites Member States to do, each strictly within their respective competences and institutional roles.
The Strategy builds on contributions received during a wide public consultation, including input from EU Member States including Presidencies of the Council, the European Parliament, civil society including the 2020 civil society shadow health strategy, and other key stakeholders in Europe and beyond. The Strategy is published in parallel with the first State of Health Preparedness Report.
For More Information
Q&A on the EU Global Health Strategy
Factsheet on the EU Global Health Strategy
The State of Health Preparedness report
Press Release on the State of Health Preparedness report
Factsheet on the State of Health Preparedness report and HERA Work Plan 2023