We need to invest in service delivery and education for drugs and therapies, in mothers and children, in preventative campaigns, in health and care professionals and in NGO support teams.

A healthier longer living population means later years of high dependency, often with mental as well as physical frailty; lifestyle, education and work pressures, changes in family structures, isolation, forced population movements, can all trigger mental health problems –psychoses, neuroses and often with an addiction link; new drugs, therapies and treatments have come at an escalating cost; new costs accompany new beds, centres, day care and community teams.

Major EU-based research into ion therapy (proton and carbon ions) will open up and further improve already successful methods of cancer treatment and strengthen the competitivity of plant engineering and the construction (accelerator technology) and medical technology industries.

Even now, young doctors coming out of medical school don't know how to do an IV because there are IV teams or nurse practitioners who do the shots for flu and allergies.

Today, I would add, the issues which need to be addressed most urgently are these: the lack, not to say complete absence, of negative pressure isolation rooms, necessary to prevent nosocomial infection, in the principal hospitals of the States of the European Union; the impossibility of quarantining a patient highly likely to have the disease but who refuses to be placed in isolation, due to the fact that there are no laws imposing enforced hospitalisation except on grounds of mental health; we need to start thinking about training, setting up specialised healthcare teams in the individual states to treat patients with diseases such as SARS, who cannot be given specific treatment but only adjunct treatment and who ...[+++]require input from a wide range of specialists – lung specialists, virologists, anaesthetists, resuscitation specialists, internists, dieticians – and nursing staff capable of managing and caring for patients suffering from SARS.

Finally, this year, developing active community therapy teams or treatment teams has been included in some of the ministry's mental health objectives.