A report that 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.

A report that 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 right of patients from EU Member States to travel to another Member State to receive healthcare is a principle that has been confirmed on a number of occasions over the last ten years by the European Court of Justice, but uncertainty remains over how that right should function in practice. In an attempt to provide some clarity, the Commission published its proposal for a Directive on the application of patients' rights in cross-border healthcare.

Examining which actors determine undocumented migrants’ access to healthcare on the ground, this volume looks at what happens in the daily interactions between administrative personnel, healthcare professionals and migrant patients in healthcare institutions across Europe. Borders across Healthcare explores contemporary moral economies of the healthcare-migration nexus. The volume documents the many ways in which borders come to disrupt healthcare settings and illuminates how judgements of a health-related deservingness become increasingly important, producing hierarchies that undermine a universal right to healthcare.

This volume, developed by the Observatory together with OECD, provides an overall conceptual framework for understanding and applying strategies aimed at improving quality of care. Crucially, it summarizes available evidence on different quality strategies and provides recommendations for their implementation. This book is intended to help policy-makers to understand concepts of quality and to support them to evaluate single strategies and combinations of strategies.

Cross-border health care has become a much more prominent phenomenon in the European Union. When in need of medical treatment, patients increasingly act as informed consumers who claim the right to choose their own providers, including those beyond borders. This book explores such trends and also looks at the legal framework for cross-border care as well as examining some of the uncertainties surrounding it. After the adoption of the Directive on the application of patient rights in cross-border care, Member States will now have to start implementing these provisions. One of the challenges will be to see how various national practices related to access, benefits and tariffs, quality and safety, patient rights, cooperation etc. will be affected by these new rules. The information and analysis presented in the study can be of considerable use to policy-makers and those with an interest in key aspects of cross-border health care to accompany or follow this process.