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Our healthcare systems focus on disease treatment rather than prevention and healthy livings. Non-Communicable Diseases (‘NCDs’) are responsible for 87% of the disease burden in the European Member States and improved health promotion and disease prevention can reduce the prevalence of NCDs by as much as 70% (EU4Health Program, European Commission, 2022). ​

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we brought together leading Ashoka health social entrepreneurs in Europe to draw a collective picture of our healthcare systems in order to identify the root causes to what we believe to be one of the most pressing issues in the field: the dominance and reliance of medical standard interventions when holistic and social care is more applicable in healthcare systems. ​

We are gathering our key learnings and future actions together in a knowledge product, bringing forward the key causes of dominance and reliance of medical standard interventions. We will exemplify the causality of social inequality, information asymmetry, lack of holistic care vision in training and education, power imbalances between patients and health practitioners- among others. The knowledge product highlights key insights from social entrepreneurs and their organizations as well as the communities they represent to advocate for and enable holistic and social healthcare in Europe. ​