Jennifer Dixon – “We really have a big impetus for change which is absent in other countries”

The Sciana network, an international collaboration between The Health Foundation, Careum Stiftung and the Robert Bosch Stiftung, brings together leaders in health and health care policy to find solutions to shared challenges being faced in health care across Europe. During the inaugural meeting, facilitated by Salzburg Global Seminar and hosted at Hotel Schloss Leopoldskron, foundation partners, senior ambassadors and members worked to find differences between their respective health care systems in Germany, Switzerland, and the UK.

Jennifer Dixon, chief executive of The Health Foundation, found the inaugural meeting shed light on the financial differences of the three health systems, particularly how funding affects the momentum for change.

“What has been really interesting, and came out really forcefully, is the amount of money that is available in Germany and Switzerland to spend on health care. Money is just not an issue. The population are satisfied with health care, the economies are in surplus, GDP growth is quite healthy; therefore, there is no burning platform for change,” says Dixon.

“However, in the UK, our economy is doing reasonably well, but as a result of the financial deficit we’ve had, as a result of the banking crisis, we’ve had to make up enormous amounts of public sector debt. As a result of that the health care sector has been squeezed, so no longer are we seeing four percent real terms growth, as they are seeing in Germany, but we’re seeing less than one percent real terms growth over the decade between 2010 and 2020. This is a very, very challenging environment. So, as a result, we have a burning platform to make significant changes and we have no option – we have to do that, otherwise we will run out of money and the population’s satisfaction with the system will nosedive. So we really have a big impetus for change, which is absent in other countries.”

The Health Foundation chose to be involved with the Sciana network as a result of a lunch meeting between Dixon, Bernadette Klapper, chief of department for health at the Robert Bosch Stiftung, and Hans Gut, president of the Careum Stiftung.

“We were meeting as usual in America, and we felt it was crazy that we always meet in America and yet there was so much to discuss between us European partners. So why did we not think of setting up something for leaders in Europe to meet together and foster much more collaboration between each other; chewing over some of the basic issues that affect us all in health care and social care,” Dixon explains.

“We have been divided by a language for so long, but I think now there are so many more people across Europe who speak English we can all exchange more readily, and I think now is the time to capitalize on that.”

Dixon hopes the health leaders network, which will continue to meet over the next two years, will result in successive waves of leaders who are familiar with European issues and health systems, eventually partnering with leaders from other European nations to expand the wealth of knowledge.

“It would be very nice, after five or 10 years, if there’s a viable group of people across Europe who know each other, regularly meet with each other, and have long standing relations, contacts, over common issues that are evolving,” Dixon says. “That’s what I would really like – in the way that we currently do have with our American colleagues, it would be nice to have much more of this across Europe.”