Europe's efforts to boost its economy and get people back to work will be undermined by the failure to tackle the key issue of improving healthcare, claims Dave Wilcox (UK/PES), Committee of the Regions' (CoR) rapporteur on health inequalities.

Commenting after his draft opinion on ' Solidarity in health: reducing inequalities in the EU ' was adopted by the natural resources (NAT) commission of the CoR on Tuesday, Wilcox stressed that health issues were largely ignored by other EU policies despite having a clear influence on key issues such as productivity and competitiveness.

"Europe is currently suffering from a major economic and financial crisis, yet among all the proposals to lift our economies out of the doldrums, there is little or no mention of health issues. A healthy workforce is an obvious advantage when it comes to boosting productivity and improving competitiveness; investing more in ensuring that every EU citizen has access to the best quality health services and the highest possible quality of life would be one way of supporting more general measures to encourage economic growth and boost job creation."

Wilcox stressed that good will alone would not be enough to improve the situation. "If we want to reduce health inequalities then the EU has to put some resources behind that objective. Structural funds could be put to more widespread use in this area, for example, and the ongoing discussions over the EU2020 plan for growth and jobs should be widened to include this key issue."

Wilcox also underlined the need for a more comprehensive approach to assessing the impact of efforts to reduce inequalities in healthcare. "We need to be able to know how we want to measure the changes that we are looking for in terms of reducing inequalities. This is not just a question of looking at how long people live, but at how long the wider population lives too, so that we then start to focus on the inequalities as well as the improvements. The information which we currently collect is deficient. There are some common measures such as infant mortality and anticipated healthy life expectancy but we need some more measures that look at inequalities as well as the general average change that has taken place across countries. That's why we need a regional input into this: if we can get the better measures and talk to all the regions about what is required, then we have a way forward."

Wilcox added that he and fellow CoR member Karsten Uno Petersen (DK/PES), author of the CoR's 2009 opinion on cross-border healthcare , had put forward a proposal to create an inter-regional group on health inequalities that would attempt to define a new set of criteria for assessing health inequalities. "We have had a very positive feedback to our proposal, not least from the European Commission which is keen to use the expertise of the Committee of the Regions and its members to improve its own statistical assessment procedures, as well as benefiting from more regular contact with local and regional representatives on the key issue of health care. Our hope is that this group, if it is agreed, can help turn this opinion into something more akin to an action programme."