Promotion of Public Health

SFEE attaches the utmost importance to health promotion through all public policies and aims to educate citizens on health issues, enabling them to demand better conditions for their health and secure their inalienable right to public healthcare. Because health is not just about “techniques” or “policies”. Health is the philosophy that should permeate all policy priorities and business strategies.

Preserving the health of a human being and, ultimately, of society as a whole, may be a process starting from the individual and ending up back to the individual, but is in fact a collective process that involves many interactions. Promoting health in a society of people is therefore a relatively complex activity which starts from the personal level and evolves into a social system, requirings joint action.

According to the World Health Organization, “health promotion” is defined as “the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health. It moves beyond a focus on individual behaviour towards a wide range of social and environmental interventions”. These interventions should come both from private initiative and from the public sector which in most societies is entrusted with the institutional responsibility for designing healthcare policy and ensuring the health of the population.

SFEE, as the major institutional body that expresses and organises the joint activities of private pharmaceutical suppliers, has been on the side of society and patients ever since it was established 30 years ago, and all the more so in the years of the crisis, and has developed a strategy which is far from the typical “corporate unionism”.

For Greek and multinational pharmaceutical companies and their provenly sensitive people, an essential requirement for the promotion of public health is the development of a healthy public policy that is based on the following factors: income, shelter, food security, employment, and quality and conditions of work. Apart from the close collaboration of health services, health promotion also requires the contribution of all parties that can influence these broader factors.

SFEE attaches the utmost importance to health promotion and aims to educate citizens on health issues, enabling them to demand better conditions for their health.

SFEE’s health promotion strategy is based on the rationale that citizens have a constitutional right to human dignity and a good quality of life, which points to the need to improve the economic, environmental and social determinants of health. The progress of Greek society crucially depends on the effective removal of the boundaries between the State and private initiative and the development of bold partnerships that create a strong dynamics to achieve new goals.