Health at a Glance: Europe 2022
State of Health in the EU Cycle
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The 2022 edition of Health at a Glance: Europe examines the key challenges European countries must address to develop stronger, more resilient health systems following the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. It includes a special focus on how the pandemic has affected young people’s mental and physical health. The report emphasises the need for additional measures to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic from scarring a generation of young people. This edition of Health at a Glance: Europe also assesses the pandemic’s disruption of a wide range of health services for non-COVID patients, as well as the policy responses European countries deployed to minimise the adverse consequences of these disruptions. It also addresses a number of important behavioural and environmental risk factors that have a major impact on people’s health and mortality, highlighting the need to put a greater focus on the prevention of both communicable and non-communicable diseases.
Waiting times for elective surgery
Long waiting times for elective (non-urgent) surgery have been a longstanding issue in many European countries dating back well before the pandemic, but the disruption of elective care during the pandemic exacerbated waiting times as many non-urgent interventions were suspended, generating more backlogs of patients on waiting lists. Long waiting times generate dissatisfaction for patients because the health benefits from treatment are postponed, patients can experience pain and discomfort while waiting, and the wait may worsen health outcomes for patients before and after the intervention.
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