Healthcare Across EU Borders: A Safe Framework

The House of Lords European Union Committee welcomes the proposal from the European Commission for a Directive on patients’ rights to cross-border healthcare but calls for improvements and warns that, due to the unpredictable impact of the provisions in the Directive, it must be carefully monitored upon implementation. The Committee agrees with the Commission that, as the right of EU citizens to travel to another Member State to receive healthcare has been confirmed by the European Court of Justice over the last ten years, it is essential to put in place a legal framework to replace the current ad hoc arrangements. The report recommends that a patient’s own healthcare provider should pay any fees directly to the provider in the other Member State. It suggests that this could be linked with the process of securing authorisation prior to travel, which the Committee considers necessary both in order to protect the financial resources of health systems and to enable patients to make informed decisions about their treatment. The report also calls on Member States to ensure that patients are aware of their rights under the Directive and are informed about the quality of care that they can expect, any potential language barriers, and how to make a complaint should that be necessary. Member States should finance information for its own citizens about healthcare abroad and should draw up a description of its own health system to guide other Member States. Acknowledging that it may fall to medical practitioners, such as GPs and dentists, to provide the information to patients, the Committee argues that the Directive should avoid the imposition of any administrative burden on healthcare professionals.