Health at a Glance: Europe 2022
State of Health in the EU Cycle
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.
Unmet health care needs
Accessibility to health care can be limited for a number of reasons, including cost, distance to the closest health facility and waiting times. The disruption of health services during the pandemic also resulted in unmet health care needs as resources were mobilised to address the crisis and people were encouraged to stay home to reduce virus transmission. Information about unmet health care needs can be sought by using different survey instruments that provide different results. The data presented here rely on the regular Eurostat EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey and Eurofound’s Living, working and COVID‑19 e‑survey.