About us

Healthcare Professionals Crossing Borders (HPCB) is a partnership of healthcare regulators in Europe.

We contribute to patient safety through regulatory collaboration in the context of:

• increasing levels of mobility in Europe by health professionals
• maintaining patient safety across borders
• meeting requirements for increased administrative cooperation between regulators.

How we began

‘Crossing Borders’ began in 2004 as an EU-wide conference on regulatory information exchange.

An informal partnership of European healthcare regulators was created a year later.

Our agreements

We created our founding principles at the European Regulators' Consensus Conference in 2005. This two-year plan became known as the Edinburgh Agreement.

Between 2006 and 2007, we developed a new programme of work – known as the Portugal Agreement. This is an informal framework for:

• identifying shared principles of regulation
• providing transparent and accessible healthcare regulation
• providing competence assurance of European healthcare professionals.