Unmet healthcare needs in the EU: Hungary ranks first

A survey reveals that over one-third of Hungarians have not had sufficient access to healthcare services in the spring of 2021 due to the pandemic. That is almost double the EU average.

As g7.hu reports, according to the most recent Eurofound survey, the postponement of non-essential treatments has affected Hungarians the worst out of all EU member states, where 36% of respondents said that they have had to miss a medical examination or surgery due to the lack of appointments in the past 12 months. That makes the situation only slightly better than in the summer of 2020 when

38% claimed that the pandemic had negatively affected their access to healthcare services.

The EU averages were around 20% for both rounds of the survey, while Denmark, Austria, and Germany reported the lowest figures, all of them under 15% both in the summer of 2020 and the spring of 2021. Some of the worst-performing countries alongside Hungary are Portugal and Latvia, where approximately 35% and 30% of respondents said that they had unmet healthcare needs, respectively.

While Miklós Kásler, the Minister of Human Resources, has recently given the go-ahead on non-essential treatments, as Népszava explains,

it is going to take a long time until the healthcare system can return to its pre-pandemic way of operation.