Search

The meeting was organised by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and held at the JRC-Geel site on 22–23 February 2018. It was a follow-up of a similar meeting held in 2009. The objective of the meeting was to exchange information about ongoing publicly funded reference material (RM) production, identify areas of interest for future specific RMs, including certified reference material (CRM) developments, investigate potential areas of collaboration, and to identify areas which may be of a lower importance in the future for a specific RM producer. The benefit of exchanging such information is to avoid duplication of efforts in RM production, make better use of public funds by potentially matching competencies, and to address problems that are common to publicly funded RM producers. Attendees included representatives of the following organisations: Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und –prüfung (BAM), Germany; IAEA Environment Laboratories, Monaco; the Joint Research Centre (JRC), Belgium (formerly IRMM); the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS), South Korea; LGC, UK, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), USA; the National Measurement Institute of Australia (NMIA), Australia; the National Metrology Institute of South Africa (NMISA), South Africa; and the National Research Council Canada (NRCC), Canada. National Metrology Institute of Japan (NMIJ), Japan, and National Institute of Metrology (NIM), China, were invited but declined or were unable to attend. The remaining nine attendees participated physically or via videoconference. The full group of eleven RM producers corresponds to the major publicly funded RM producers according to the activity reports of the International Standards Organisation’s committee on reference materials (ISO-REMCO).

The subject of the research is healthcare financing systems in European countries and Russia. The relevance of the problem stems from the possibility of using successful foreign experience for the organization of healthcare financing in Russia. The purpose of the research was to examine the specific features of the establishing and funding healthcare models in countries of Europe and the possibilities of their experience in organizing healthcare financing in the Russian Federation. The paper examines the current state of the two models of health financing in the EU — budget funding and insurance. By the example of individual European countries, the operation specifics of each model are analyzed, their advantages and disadvantages are assessed. Particular attention is paid to the specifics of the healthcare financing system in Russia and its difference from foreign systems. Taking into account the foreign experience and the need to improve the Russian compulsory healthcare insurance (CHI) system, the paper proposes ways to improve the Russian model of healthcare financing: establishment of a unified organizational and financial CHI model; introduction of a system of equal participation of the employer and employee in the financing of compulsory healthcare insurance; introduction of a family insurance system; promotion of voluntary healthcare insurance programs. It is concluded that the keypoint in the CHI system restructuring should be the search for socially acceptable and economically justified forms of attracting public funds. At the same time, it is extremely important that the funds received by medical institutions do not increase the shadow incomes in the economy but are spent on the development of the healthcare system.