German health minister Jens Spahn speaks on modernising the healthcare system.
Health governance is a key element to regaining people’s trust in democratic processes, German Minister of Health Jens Spahn said in a keynote at the Hertie School on 4 November. The minister spoke at the presentation of the Hertie School’s Governance Report 2019, which explores how health governance can help meet current and future challenges facing health systems.
“We need to do whatever we can to regain trust in politics and democratic processes,” Spahn said, noting that health governance is key to this endeavour.
The keynote was followed by a panel discussion on the changes required to ensure healthcare systems can meet social, political, and economic challenges: aging populations, immigration, changing family structures, rising chronic illnesses, and digitalisation, among others.
Governance Report authors Ellen Immergut, Professor of Political Science and Comparative Politics at the European University Institute, on leave from the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin; Hanna Schwander, Professor of Political Sociology and Social Policy at the Humboldt-Universität; Mujaheed Shaikh, Professor of Health Governance at the Hertie School; and Claus Wendt, Professor of Sociology of Health and Healthcare Systems at the University of Siegen participated in a wide-ranging discussion moderated by Klaus Hurrelmann, Professor of Public Health and Education at the Hertie School.
Topics included how health systems governance can ensure accountability, reconcile the interests of different institutions and ensure effective patient-oriented structures, and which global, regional and local innovations can produce intelligent systems that can learn and adapt to changing contexts.
The Governance Report 2019, published by Oxford University Press, was edited by Hurrelmann, Shaikh and Wendt and funded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung GmbH, which also sponsors the Professorship of Health Governance at the Hertie School.
The event was hosted as part of Berlin Science Week.
