From 1 January 2015 and until June, Latvia holds, for the first time, the 6-month’s rotating Presidency of the Council.
Latvia’s objectives for healthcare are in line with its global priorities: competitiveness and growth, full use of digital potential in the economy and a greater role for the European Union in the global arena.
In particular, with regard to Medical Devices and In-vitro Medical Devices, reaching an agreement with the Parliament on the proposals constitutes an absolute priority for the current Presidency, as informed the Minister of Health of Latvia to the Members of the Health Committee (ENVI) of the European Parliament on 21 January 2015. To facilitate this agreement, the Minister announced that he had put together a timetable to contact personally the Ministers of Health of all Member States.
“The regulations should improve patient safety and product quality, while not creating additional obstacles for innovation”, wrote the Latvian Minister in The Parliament Magazine. Innovation plays an important role for a Presidency which, in its program, explicitly says that “robust, transparent and sustainable regulatory framework to support innovation and the competitiveness of the medical device industry and to allow rapid and cost-efficient market access for innovative medical devices is necessary for the benefit of patients and healthcare professionals alike”.
eHealth will also be in the spotlight. The Presidency is organising an eHealth week (11-13 May, Riga), in which the Presidency will attach importance to the empowerment of patients, the use of technologies to improve the quality of healthcare and innovations in eHealth/mHealth.
More information available here.
