Investing and Disinvesting

Health promotion and broader services that promote health need to have realistic starting points. This means better use of existing assets. For example, the OECD report on ‘Wasteful Spending in Health’ presented alarming data on wasted resources with estimations ranging from a conservative 10% up to 34% of expenditures. The COVID-19 pandemic has also shed new lights on the demand for health care treatments, which needs to be further investigated. A reallocation of resources - the freeing of resources and accordingly the reinvestment - is an urgent priority for sustainable and resilient European healthcare systems.

 

For crossover interventions involving multiple sectors or borders, it means identifying where these assets are and how they are being used within strategic and intervention specific value chains (most valuable areas of activity) and networks. There are different ways to facilitate an adequate process to disinvest to reinvest. To be effective, these processes need to be transparent, systematic and explicit in order to assess the potential for disinvestment in certain interventions and technologies.

Case studies