Belgium is ranked 35th in the healthcare resilience barometer, which includes countries in the Middle East and Africa. Our country’s overall performance is roughly equivalent to that of Spain (34th) and the Czech Republic (36th), but it lags significantly behind countries like France, Germany and Scandinavia. Even the United Kingdom, whose health system has collapsed in recent years, is ahead of us.
The difference with our neighbors, according to the specialists present during the presentation of the barometer, is that the French and Dutch have dared to reform their health system.
One of the big problems, which comes up in every bulletin, and during studies by the Superior Health Council, is the weakness of our prevention system. Its Achilles heel: regionalization. The solution could be not a reverse institutional reform, unlikely with the NVA in power, but a distinction between a first line of prevention – campaigns to move, eat healthily, etc., and a second line, which would launch campaigns of screenings (colorectal cancer, breast cancer, HPV), and vaccination across the entire country.
-Another weakness is the slow implementation of new technologies and the absence of reliable data (anonymized, of course), which would give an almost real-time view of the public health situation, in hospitals where we still works on the basis of continuous text medical reports, where an AI-recognizable keyword recognition system could move things forward.
If we do not react quickly, it will not be a repetition of grades that will punish Belgian inertia, but a risk of collapse of its health care.
