Flanders offers some of the highest-quality health care services in the world. The national health care system provides benefits for hospital, medical, pharmaceutical, some allied services and ambulance during your stay.
The Belgian State health care system provides in free emergency care for visiting EU citizens, under the same terms as locals, using the European Health Insurance Card, EHIC (formerly E111).
Non EU citizens need a private health insurance to be able to recuperate possible costs. For tourists it is part of their travel insurance. A private health insurance is also necessary for EU citizens who want to cover non-emergency care plus (like repatriation etc.).
What to do when you get ill?
If you have any of the following symptoms (cough, respiratory problems, fever, aches and pains, fatigue, loss of smell or taste, diarrhoea), please follow these steps:
- Stay at the accommodation / holiday residence / hotel … (even if your symptoms are mild).
- Inform the owner/manager who will call a general practitioner (GP) and report your symptoms.
- Don't go to the GP or to a hospital accident & emergency unit on your own initiative.
- The GP will tell you by phone what to do. E.g. to go to your GP practice or a triage centre for a test.
- Make a list of all the people you came in close contact with.
- Did you test positive? A government employee will call you to start the contact tracing.
If the GP suspects that you have COVID-19, they will test you or refer you to the local triage centre. The test will be sent to the lab for analysis that same day.
Stay at the accommodation / holiday residence / hotel … as long as you haven’t received the test results. In the meantime, your GP will ask you to make a list of all the people you came into contact with up to two days before your symptoms began. This list will only be used if your test is positive, as part of the contact follow-up.
You will always receive your test results, regardless of whether the outcome is positive or negative. Did you test positive? Your health condition will be closely monitored, and you will be prescribed the necessary treatment. The contact centre will take the necessary steps to inform the people close to you and your contacts that they may have been exposed to a COVID-19 carrier.
In order to avoid COVID-19 once again spreading throughout the population, we are performing contact tracing.
If somebody falls ill due to the virus that causes COVID-19, we ask that sick person for the names of people he has been in contact with. It is, after all, possible that those people are infected with the virus.
We then phone or visit those contacts. We provide advice on what they should do to prevent them from infecting other people in their immediate vicinity. The more infections we can avoid in this way, the better.