“Transforming healthcare: EU funding for strategic innovation and development projects- Dutch and Polish experiences”

Schuman Associates was honoured to respond to the invitation of The Embassy of the Kingdom of Netherlands in Poland and the Netherlands-Polish Chamber of Commerce and to participate in the international conference “Transforming healthcare. EU funding for strategic innovation and development projects. Dutch and Polish experiences” that took place on the 14th of June in Warsaw.

 The conference brought together Polish representatives of the central and local government, international experts in the field of transformation of healthcare systems, national and provincial health consultants and providers of solutions for the healthcare market from the Netherlands. The following themes were addressed:

• Opportunities and challenges of the Polish healthcare market.
• Priorities and investment opportunities in the healthcare system with the use of EU Funds.
• Experiences of the Netherlands in the transition to an innovative and integrated healthcare model.
• Strategic projects in the regional health policy - how to prepare, finance, manage and implement strategic projects? The perspective of regional authorities, hospital directors, and strategic investors.
• The hospital of the 21st century - how to balance the treatment quality improvement and cost optimization? The perspective of regional authorities, hospital directors, and patients.

Our colleague, Anca Calugaru, spoke about the EU funding available to develop the Polish health system by 2020 and offered a regional Central and Eastern Europe perspective of the future challenges and EU opportunities in the health care sector.

You can see here the video with the key outcomes of the event. 

In context

The Kingdom of the Netherlands currently holds the Presidency of the Council of the European Union. Within the European Union ageing societies are a growing challenge. Furthermore, the rising expenditures on healthcare and patients’ growing expectations regarding the standard of the offered healthcare demand innovative solutions. It is therefore not surprising that medical entities and healthcare personnel in Europe, including Poland and the Netherlands, require both investments and transformation to ensure a healthy future.

More than 2.9 billion EUR in EU funding will be allocated by the EU and managed by the Polish Government for the development of a sustainable health system by 2020. The budget is higher than the total EU investment that Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Bulgaria and Czech Republic will altogether receive over the same period.

About 60 programmes (calls for projects) worth 900 million EUR are under preparation and will be available in 2016 for hospitals, public health centers, outpatient centers and other relevant bodies to improve their building premises, to buy new medical equipment, to test new models of organizing care (introduce new protocols, restructure patients’ flows etc.), to train their medical staff and to run screening and prevention programmes in the areas of colorectal, cervical and breast cancer.

If you would like to get more information about the EU funding opportunities for healthcare in Poland as well as across the EU, you can reach our colleagues at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.