As part of its cooperation with South-eastern Europe, Switzerland has supported Romania's transition from the start through bilateral cooperation projects and regional programmes. In fact, Romania has been a priority country for Swiss cooperation with Eastern Europe and the CIS since 1992 (financial assistance through SECO), and 1996 (technical assistance through SDC), respectively.

As in many other priority countries of SDC in Eastern Europe and the CIS, the sector of Health Reforms is one of the main areas of Swiss cooperation. The transformation of the Health System requires enormous and innovative efforts to keep it accessible to all and at an affordable cost. However, this area is not part of the "Acquis Communautaire" for the accession to the European Union and thus no priority has been set in this sense.

The Country Programme 2001-2005 of SDC and SECO for Romania – declared valid until 2007 – defines the support of Health Sector reforms as one of four priority areas. The other areas of support from SDC and SECO are the Private sector support, Infrastructure and Environment and Regional programmes. The support to the Health Sector Reform Programme aims at developing high-quality and financially viable health services in the fields of emergency care, neonatal care, care at home and hospital administration, promoting and developing the principle of family doctors to guarantee adequate care at the local level, and supporting the reorganisation and training and further training measure at all levels of care.

SDC supports four majors projects in the Health domain in Romania:

• The Public Health Master project
• The Regional Emergency Medical Services Systems project (REMSSy)
• The Ascona (public health management training) project
• The Romanian Neonatology Project (RoNeonat)