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Health and Education Policy: Labour Markets, Qualifications, and the Struggle over Standards

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Book cover Education and Public Policy in the European Union

Abstract

European Union (EU) health policy has rarely been made as health policy—internal market or fiscal governance policies have been far more than actions taken under the deliberately weak and relatively new treaty bases for health action. Actions taken in the name of the internal market, in particular, to do with cross-border professional mobility and research, reshape health policy and systems, and thereby health education. The result is an increasingly important continent-wide series of labour markets and piecemeal training reforms for health workers whose underpinning in harmonised education, and whose quality control, is far from clear. EU health research funding, meanwhile, has a bias towards the latter objective of industrial policy, even if that might be counterproductive from a health or public expenditure perspective.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For those who are attentive to it, there is a strong academic literature. The widest raging introduction is Greer et al. (2014). The key legal text is Hervey and McHale (2015). A 2017 handbook (Hervey et al. 2017) has largely superseded the older Mossialos et al. (2010). The state of political science of EU health care can be found in a special issue, volume 15 number 3 of Comparative European Politics and in Greer (2014).

  2. 2.

    There are many definitions of public health, and its domain is often contested, but it is fundamentally activity that promotes health at the population level, primarily through prevention, ranging from food safety to vaccinations to control of epidemics (Greer and Kurzer 2013; Greer and Mätzke 2012).

  3. 3.

    Directive 2011/24/EU on patients’ rights in cross-border health care.

  4. 4.

    This was at best a partial if not wholly wrong reading of how Eurozone economies worked, a topic dealt with best in Hancké (2013).

  5. 5.

    Blazoned on its home page, 7 November 2017. https://ec.europa.eu/research/index.cfm?pg=dg

  6. 6.

    https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/active-and-assisted-living-joint-programme-aal-jp consulted 7 November 2017.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Scott L. Greer

  2. Medizinische Hochschule Hannover, Hannover, Germany

    Ellen Kuhlmann

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  1. Scott L. Greer
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  2. Ellen Kuhlmann
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Correspondence to Scott L. Greer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Sarah K. St. John

  2. School of Education, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Mark Murphy

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Greer, S.L., Kuhlmann, E. (2019). Health and Education Policy: Labour Markets, Qualifications, and the Struggle over Standards. In: St. John, S., Murphy, M. (eds) Education and Public Policy in the European Union. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04230-1_4

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