The Commission has proposed a new, ambitious stand-alone health programme for the 2021-2027 period, the EU4Health Programme.

EU4Health will make a significant contribution to the post-COVID-19 recovery by making the EU population healthier, strengthening the resilience of health systems, and promoting innovation in the health sector. This new programme will also fill the gaps revealed by the COVID-19 crisis and ensure that EUs health systems are resilient enough to face new and future health threats.

The EU4Health programme has three general objectives:

• protecting people in the EU from serious cross-border health threats and improving crisis management capacity;

• making medicines, medical devices and other crisis relevant products, available and affordable and supporting innovation;

• strengthen health systems and the health care workforce, including by investing in public health, for instance through health promotion and disease prevention programmes and improving access to healthcare.

The EU4Health programme takes into account the lessons learnt and gaps revealed by the crisis to date, and will put in place structural changes to better prepare the EU for further health challenges. Once the proposal is adopted by Member States and the European Parliament, the intention is to start launching specific actions under EU4Health as of 1 January 2021. There will be a significant focus on action in the early years of the programme, in particular on crisis management.

Through the EU4Health Programme, the Commission proposes to invest €9.4 billion in strengthening health systems. This is compared to the previous Commission proposal for a health strand under the European Social Fund+ of €413 million. The funding will partly come from the EU budget (€1.7 billion), partly via external assigned revenues, stemming from the borrowing operations of the Union as set out in the EU Recovery Instrument Regulation (€7.7 billion). There will be no pre-allocation for each of the objectives mentioned in the programme. The distribution will be agreed upon during the implementation of the EU4Health programme.

For information on how B2EU Consulting could support your organisation in developing a funding strategy and in unlocking different financing tools for your operation in the health sector, please don’t hesitate to contact us at: info@b2eu-consulting.com.