Providing high-quality emergency healthcare is an essential service. However, providing emergency healthcare in border regions brings about numerous challenges. At the expert round table on 13 February 2024, four experts shared their insights on healthcare and cross-border policies, legal frameworks and operational needs for cross-border healthcare. Siegfried Weinert (Notruf Niederösterreich), Bernadett Bulyovsky (National Directorate General for Hospitals, HU), Valeria Cenacchi (European Commission – Border Focal Point), and Florian Lochner (Health Agency Lower Austria) shared some insights into policies, overcoming challenges, and lessons learned from healthcare cooperation.
Tackling high-quality healthcare services across borders
Cross-border healthcare cooperation at the Austrian-Czech border is one of the shining examples in the sector. It started out with a fateful emergency call in Czechia that landed in Austria and led to a number of cooperation projects and a bilateral agreement between the two countries. Today, similar collaborations are set up with Hungary and Slovakia. Likewise, Croatia and Romania take closer looks into how (emergency) people in border regions can access healthcare services at both sides of the border.
Since 40% of the territory in the Danube Region is defined as border region, investing in smooth cross-border healthcare cooperation benefits a large part of the macro-region’s population. However, the existence and maturity of initiatives varies greatly across the region.
The task force for cross-border emergency healthcare of Priority Area 10 “Institutional Capacity and Cooperation” therefore aims at looking at how existing initiatives could be supported and how to encourage more border regions in setting up healthcare cooperation across borders including candidate countries.
Setting up cross-border healthcare services
The expert round table addressed concrete questions ranging from how to set up legal frameworks to how to fund activities, from how to strengthen trust and overcome language barriers to where to find support from peers and experts.
One of the key learnings of the meeting is that trusting cooperation is key. Setting up a strong cooperation culture is the foundation of successful healthcare collaboration. It affects the draft of effective legal frameworks, the creation of high-quality services, and finding solutions along the way together. Hence, any cross-border healthcare cooperation needs to invest in stable stakeholder cooperation. The example of the Austrian-Czech cooperation provided a number of good practice examples on how challenges regarding liability, transport, language barriers etc. could be resolved. The example of the Hungarian-Austrian collaboration showed how the experience from Austria and the Czech Republic could be transferred and adapted to a different geographical, legal, and administrative context.
Despite the numerous challenges of such kind of cross-border services, there is a solution for everything. The experience of both the Healthacross and the Heal Now project showed that willing partners, who trust each other can find solutions and work-arounds for everything.
In doing so, all partners need to keep in mind the manageability and effectiveness of cooperation. Legal documents that regulate service provision need to work in the day-to-day cooperation and must not be too comprehensive or complicated. Likewise, bureaucratic procedures need to be kept at a minimum.
Last, but not least, there is – as usual – no one size fits all solution for cross-border healthcare services. However, there are many examples from all over Europe that showcase different aspects of healthcare collaborations across borders. Those examples can serve as inspiration and guide for other initiatives. In order to develop the missing link between cross-border healthcare elements and specific national and regional legal and administrative, sociocultural contexts, initiatives such as b-solutions or the new European Cross-Border Mechanism could provide support.
