About Self-Care
Every day, at every stage of life, we experience moments of joy, but also minor health issues and everyday discomforts. Taking care of our health often starts with simple, informed choices and routine actions. Self‑care is an essential part of daily life.
Self‑care empowers individuals to take an active role in maintaining their health and wellbeing. It complements professional healthcare and plays a vital role in modern health systems.
What is self-care?
The World Health Organization defines self‑care as the ability of individuals, families and communities to promote health, prevent disease, maintain health, and cope with illness and disability with or without the support of a healthcare provider.
The self-care continuum includes a wide range of simple routine actions. It starts with basic everyday behaviours such as good hygiene and healthy lifestyle choices, including balanced nutrition, physical activity, and avoiding smoking and excessive alcohol consumption. It also involves becoming more engaged in managing one’s own health by developing health literacy and having the skills and support needed to prevent, recognise, treat and monitor minor ailments.
By encouraging greater autonomy and engagement, self‑care strengthens individual responsibility for health while complementing conventional healthcare services.
About self-care products
Self‑care is central to how we live today. When we feel unwell, we want reliable, simple and effective solutions that help us recover quickly and continue our daily lives. Visiting a doctor is not always necessary or convenient for minor health issues, especially when safe self‑care options are available.
At AESGP, we do what we can to make that possible, by promoting the availability and continuous supply of a wide range of safe and effective self‑care products.
Self‑care products include:
- non‑prescription medicines (also known as OTC medicines),
- food supplements, including vitamins and minerals,
- self‑care medical devices.
These products help manage and treat many common and minor conditions, such as colds and flu, coughs, sore throats, allergies, digestive discomfort, sunburn, warts, mild to moderate pain (including headaches and muscular pain), and minor skin conditions such as cuts, insect bites or eczema.
A balanced diet usually provides the nutrients needed for good health. However, when dietary intake is insufficient or certain medical conditions (such as cancer, diabetes or chronic diarrhoea) lead to deficiencies, food supplements can help fill nutritional gaps. Individual nutrients, such as iron or vitamin D, may also be used to address specific deficiencies.
Self-care: a win-win solution
When practised responsibly, self‑care delivers wide‑ranging benefits. It empowers individuals to better manage their health and wellbeing, improves the allocation of healthcare resources, and contributes to more sustainable and efficient healthcare systems. In doing so, self‑care also delivers long‑term value for society as a whole.
Why is self-care important?
We expect the healthcare system to be there when we need it. However, rising costs, increasing demand from an ageing population and non‑communicable diseases make this increasingly difficult. Our challenge as a society is to ensure equal access to care for all while reducing the burden on the healthcare system.
At AESGP, we see this challenge as an opportunity to promote responsible self-care as an integral part of a comprehensive health promotion and disease prevention strategy in Europe. Whether it’s by working with policymakers and regulators to ensure safe and easy access to a wider range of self-care products across Europe, promoting health literacy so that healthcare professionals can give better advice and people can make more informed choices, or driving digital innovation to deliver healthcare solutions tailored to people’s individual needs, AESGP is committed to doing its part to ensure the sustainability of the entire healthcare system.We work with policymakers and regulators to support safe and appropriate access to self‑care products, promote health literacy so people can make informed decisions, and encourage innovation that delivers healthcare solutions tailored to individual needs.
Self-care is the first line of defence in European healthcare. But self-care isn’t alone care. It is supported by government, industry and healthcare professionals who all do what they can for our self-care journey. When we all work together to empower self-care, that’s good – for us, for our friends and families, and for society.
At AESGP, we believe that “Together we can take care of ourselves.”