The highest Executive Committee of the BSPC, led by Chairman Sylvia Bretschneider, met for the second time in 2015 in the Ozeaneum of Stralsund, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, on 29th May. Delegations from Åland-Islands, Baltic Assembly, Estonia, Finland, German Bundestag, Hamburg, Kaliningrad, Latvia, Lithuania, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Nordic Council, Russian Federation and St. Petersburg participated in the meeting.
The work focused on the preparation for the 24th annual conference, which will take place in Rostock-Warnemünde from 30th August – 1st September 2015. The Themes discussed at the annual conference will be cooperation in the Baltic Sea Region, cross-border cooperation in healthcare, health economy as well as the question of the sustainable and accessible social- and healthcare at the crossroads of the healthcare provision, the demographic shift and shrinking budgets in the individual states. Therefore, the conclusions of the current BSPC-Working Group “Innovation in Social and Healthcare” will be especially exploited.
At the beginning of the Standing Committee Meeting the Minister of Labour, Gender Equality and Social Affairs Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Ms Birgit Hesse and the President of the University of Applied Sciences Stralsund, Prof. Dr. Falk Höhn and spoke about healthcare in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
Minister Hesse focused in her speech the challenges of a sustainable and accessible healthcare in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The trend seems to go towards an urban-rural divide. On the one hand, there are the well-supplied urban areas, where even special options are easily accessible for all. And on the other hand, there are the sparsely populated rural areas, where it is already hard to ensure basic services in some parts. That is why, regional solutions are needed. Therefore, the administrative district of Vorpommern-Greifswald became a model region to identify the potentials and possibilities of individual regions in order to be able to improve medical care in a targeted way. To improve the current situation, measures to provide the infrastructure and to simplify the accessibility to care centres have already been taken, for example a regular bus service or the chance to order a minibus to realize a visit at a doctor.
Prof. Dr. Höhn presented in his speech the University of Apllied Sciences with a focus on international cooperation in the area of medical scientific fields. He declared that worldwide contacts to more than 70 other universities and faculties exist, especially in the Baltic Sea Region. To tackle the challenges of the field of medical technology, new courses like medical information management / eHealth as well as medical informatics are offered at the School of Applied Science. Prof. Dr. Höhn also presented some completed scientific cooperation in the Baltic Sea Region, like the Telemedicine Network to improve the healthcare provision for tumours in the Euroregion of Pomerania.
These two speeches showed the participants of the meeting both, the political and the scientific and the political, views of the future sustainability of healthcare in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
Furthermore, the Standing Committee discussed the possibilities for the integration of the Youth Forum in the annual conference and the results and the implementation of last year’s resolution.