On 3 June 2026, the European Policy Centre hosted a policy briefing on "Making prevention work: from policy design to real-world impact", exploring the gap between health policy ambitions and outcomes. Moderated by Samuel Goodger, Policy Analyst in the Health and Societal Resilience programme, the discussion brought together Dr Peter Harper, oncologist, and Elizabeth Kuiper, EPC Associate Director and Head of Programme.
Harper opened with a keynote on stress, arguing that public health guidance has systematically tended towards unattainable targets. "Zero is not a target," he stressed, highlighting the benefits of harm reduction over an “all-or-nothing” approach to abstaining from harmful behaviours in chronic disease prevention. He emphasised that prevention must be clearly distinguished from disease screening campaigns: the objective is to stop people from becoming patients in the first place.
Elizabeth Kuiper situated these arguments within the EU policy landscape, identifying what she described as the "wrong pockets problem" as a key structural barrier. Health ministry reforms often generate benefits that accrue to other sectors—such as social affairs and the broader economy—making sustained investment in prevention politically difficult to justify. "If you dilute the budget and there is no money dedicated for health, then you will fall into the trap we saw around COVID-19," she warned, calling for health investments to be ring-fenced in the next Multiannual Financial Framework.
The discussion also addressed digital health, inequalities, and the political economy of prevention. Dr Harper argued that the case for prevention is more effectively made to Treasuries than to health ministries: healthier populations drive GDP growth, while the costs of inaction accumulate across generations. Alongside concerns about the digital literacy gap, Kuiper underlined its growing importance in a context of rapid technological advancement, which risks further exacerbating health inequalities.
The event was organised in partnership with PIVOT Economics and will feed into a forthcoming EPC policy brief analysing and developing recommendations on EU-level prevention policies.
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