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The first edition of the ECAM Council, the Bilateral meeting, took place in Rome in October 2020 despite the hurdles posed by the pandemic. It discussed the principal existing and future challenges, as well as existing opportunities, that have inevitably risen during the post COVID-19 reality within the field of healthcare across Africa and the Middle East.

Key Issues

 * As the frontline of the war against Covid-19, healthcare sectors across the world will benefit from an unprecedent wave of investment, after years of decline in public spending.
 * As Covid-19 has created unprecedented opportunities for hospitals and medical facilities, it also poses new opportunities to build the Hospital of the Future, accelerating change, leveraging strengths, and overcoming weaknesses.

Key Issues

 * Responses to the first Covid-19 wave show that a strong, coordinated response at the local level internationally is essential to slow the spread and reduce the negative impacts of the virus on our societies and economies.

Key Messages

 * Creating regional healthcare hubs is key to foster healthcare quality and universality.
 * Italian healthcare model combines public and private resources to provide universal and high-quality care and can become a sustainable medical tourism model.

Datas
The world after the epidemic will likely be less global and more regional.

Regionalization of the medical industry can become a tool for increasing resilience and sustainable development. Medical tourism is a growing and strategic industry, complexly tied to other sectors of the economy with a global market size of 60-75 bln € per year and 10-15 mln people, who travel for medical purpose, per year. From the standpoint of a European market, Italy is second by International arrivals, but its industry is only fifth of the German industry.

Making Italy a regional healthcare hub for Africa and the Middle East could be a win-win game to increase healthcare resilience for partner countries and to increase Italian competitiveness in this sector.

Key Messages

 * Short term goal was to develop treatment capacity to face the Covid-19 medical emergency.
 * Medium term goal is to improve our understanding of Covid-19 pathogenesis and Sars-Cov-2, building on scientific observations.
 * Long term goal is to create BSL-2 and BSL-3 structures to safely handle dangerous viruses and carry out projects to develop innovative antiviral treatments.

Datas
After the first outbreak in Wuhan, Italy became the main hotspot of the Covid-19 epidemic, which at that time was still an unknown disease for which there was no cure and limited diagnostic capacity.

In the first half of 2020, Italy faced a faster surge of infections and mortality compared to other EU countries with a 414,241 Covid-19 cases.

This pandemic emergency positioned Gruppo San Donato Hospitals at the frontline in the scientific battle against Covid-19, in particular the University and Research Hospital model allows for the development of medical and scientific excellence to push the scientific frontier.

Key Messages

 * The Italian healthcare system is one of the world’s most efficient in terms of inputs (expenditure) and outputs (life expectancy).
 * The Italian healthcare system provides universal, high-quality coverage through a regionalized public/private system.

Datas
In 2019, Italy has ranked 2nd in the top 5 countries for the Bloomberg healthiest country index, 3rd in the top 5 countries for the Healthcare access and quality index and 4th in the top 5 countries for the Bloomberg healthcare efficiency index. Besides the healthy diet and lifestyle, other indicators like preventable mortality and life expectancy at birth are behind Italy’s healthcare excellence.

Adopting the Italian healthcare system - a system guided by principles of universality, equality, equity and competition - may allow to leverage private resources to achieve high-quality and universal care for countries in the Middle East and Africa.