Almost 470,000 people in Belgium postponed or cancelled necessary medical or dental care last year for financial reasons, according to the latest figures from Statistics Flanders.
For the whole of Belgium, this equates to 4% of the population postponing or cancelling dental care last year, and 2% doing the same for medical care in 2024.
Flanders does better than the other Belgian regions: less than 1% of the population postponed medical care, compared to 2% in Wallonia and the Brussels-Capital Region. For dental care, the share in Flanders was 2%, compared to 4% in Brussels and 5% in Wallonia.
Unemployed people (15%) and tenants (5%) in particular postpone such necessary care.
Forced to stay at home
Additionally, 21% of the Flemish population indicated that they could not afford a week's holiday for financial reasons last year.
Here, too, Flanders is doing better than the other regions, with a share of 14.7% of its population who was forced to stay at home. In both Brussels and Wallonia, this percentage stood at 30%.
Unemployed people (47%), tenants (36%) and single-parent families (32%) in particular could not afford even a week's holiday.
