In December 2022, the Council Recommendation on access to affordable high-quality long-term care was approved, accompanying the introduction of the broader European Care Strategy. The Recommendation called for the submission of national action plans, detailing the measures Member States are, or are planning on, implementing regarding long-term care. Although all Member States submitted their national reports, demonstrating their continued support for the goals adopted by the Council, the mission letters of the new European Commission do not fully reflect this ambition. Indeed, long-term care is only mentioned from the perspective of tackling workforce shortages in the missions of Executive Vice-President Roxana Mînzatu.

In this context, together with the members of the Care Advocacy Alliance led by COFACE, we call on the new European Commission to incorporate all ambitions of the Care Strategy into its planning for the current mandate. Our recommendations include:

 

  • Assisting Member States in developing rights-based, person-centred long-term care services across all territories through the European Semester, European funding and increased flexibility in public spending rules.
  • Revising the Directives on Public Procurement to ensure that price alone is not decisive, but prioritises value over cost to truly promote quality, social, and environmental considerations
  • Up-skilling and re-skilling of the long-term care workforce for the provision of person-centred care services.
  • Tackling financial speculation in the long-term care sector where profit-oriented companies benefiting from large investments and often public funding reduce quality to extract undue profit, squeezing out service providers, who genuinely try to provide person-centred, quality care. These include public providers, service providers from the social economy, and care cooperatives.

 

The full joint statement, coordinated by AGE Platform, can be found here.