Luxembourg Highlights Need to Reduce Dependence on Cross-Border Health Staff

Luxembourg’s Ministry of Health and Social Security reported that the meeting of the OECD Ministerial-level Health Committee took place on Tuesday 23 January 2024 in Paris, under the chairmanship of Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Social Affairs and Public Health of Belgium, Frank Vandenbroucke.

This high-level meeting was held seven years after the last meeting of OECD health ministers and was focused on the theme “Better policies for more resilient health systems”.

In her plenary speech, Luxembourg’s Minister of Health and Social Security, Martine Deprez, underlined the importance of synergies between the areas of health and social security to guarantee better resilience of health systems.

The minister also mentioned the need to reduce dependence on health personnel from abroad. With this in mind, the ministry noted it aims to make the exercise of health professions more interesting. In this regard, the training opportunities at the University of Luxembourg have been expanded.

The minister ended her speech by emphasising the importance of health data, the basis for the development of information and intelligence systems which allow the design and evaluation of health policies based on objective information. With this in mind, the National Health Observatory's mission is to evaluate all data relevant to improving the functioning of the health system and the state of health of the Luxembourg population, the ministry added.

The minister later attended a working lunch on climate change and health, followed by a working session on prevention and health promotion: “Our priorities for a healthy population and for a health system resilient is summed up by a coordinated and intersectoral approach, centred on the person, empowered to be actively involved in the decision-making process concerning their state of health.”

At the end of the meeting, the ministers adopted a Ministerial Declaration, as well as a new framework for assessing the performance of health systems, based on existing OECD work and the results of the Patient-Reported Indicator Surveys (PaRIS survey), a study on the indicators provided by patients.