The project Action for Health and Equity: Addressing medical Deserts – or AHEAD – aims to reduce health inequalities by addressing the challenge of medical deserts and medical desertification in Europe.

Medical deserts are isolated or depopulated areas with such significant falling numbers of medical practitioners and overall health workforce shortages that they hamper health worker availability and exacerbate health inequalities in the population, especially among vulnerable groups. Our goal is to achieve better access to health services, especially in underserved areas, and more equitable access to sufficient, skilled and motivated health workers, starting with the countries involved in the project: Italy, Moldova, the Netherlands, Romania and Serbia. We aim to do this by building knowledge encouraging (digital) innovation in health service delivery, and applying a participatory approach to public health policy making. 

The AHEAD project runs from April 2021 – May 2023