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.