Accessibility to healthcare can be limited for a number of reasons, including cost, distance to the closest health facility and waiting times. The disruption of health services during the pandemic also resulted in unmet healthcare needs as resources were mobilised to address the crisis, and people were encouraged to stay home to reduce virus transmission. Information about unmet healthcare needs can be sought by using different survey instruments that provide different results. The data presented here rely on the annual Eurostat’s EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey.
Based on EU-SILC, most of the population in EU countries reported that they had no unmet medical care needs for financial reasons, distance or waiting times in 2023. Such unmet medical care needs were reported by 2.4% of the population in the EU, and by less than 2% of population in half of EU countries (Figure 7.1). However, in Estonia, 12.9% of the population reported such unmet medical care needs, mainly due to long waiting times (12.0%). In all EU countries, the burden of unmet needs for medical care falls disproportionally more on people in the lowest income group compared to the people in the highest income group. This is particularly the case in Greece where almost one in four (23.0%) people in the lowest income quintile reported going without some medical care when they needed it in 2023 compared with 3.4% among the highest income quintile. Cost was the main reason for these unmet needs (Figure 7.2). People in the lowest income group in Latvia also reported high unmet medical care needs (13.9%), which was more than three times higher than among the highest income group.
Focussing only on the subgroup of population who had some medical care needs (i.e. excluding those who reported not having any care needs) increases the rate of unmet needs in all countries, and sometimes quite substantially. In Greece, over one in five people (21%) who had medical care needs reported that their needs were not met in 2023, and the rate was much higher among people with lower income (at risk of poverty). In Latvia and Finland, over one in ten people with medical care needs reported going without their needs being met in 2023.
In most countries, a larger proportion of the population indicates some unmet needs for dental care than for medical care (Figure 7.1). This is mainly because dental care is only partially included (or not included at all) in public schemes in many countries, so it must either be paid out-of-pocket or covered through purchasing private health insurance. In 2023, more than 8% of people in Greece, Latvia, Portugal and Denmark reported unmet needs for dental care for reasons related to the organisation and functioning of healthcare services, mainly for financial reasons. As in the case for medical care, the rate of unmet needs for dental care are higher when only considering those who actually had dental care needs.
Unmet needs for medical care and dental care have increased in many EU countries following the pandemic. In the EU as a whole, the unmet medical care needs across the entire population rose from 1.7% in 2019 to 2.0% in 2021 and 2.4% in 2023, whereas it increased from 2.8% in 2019 to 3.1% in 2021 and to 3.4% in 2023 for unmet dental care needs. The main reason for the increase in unmet needs for medical care were long waiting times, while the main reasons for unmet needs for dental care were cost and waiting times.
