EHFF represents Ireland and Ales Bourek constitute the EHFF team. Currently the project website is under development but will be accessible in the first quarter of 2025.

At the November strategy meeting it was proposed that this new activity, led by Tobias, but with support from several other Advisory group members, will offer both an alternative approach to healthcare futures in Europe but also attract the interest of younger professionals and enhance the EHFF network activities. The process of setting up the hackathon may take a few months.

The other is about data (mapping): e.g. using sewage water as indicator of prevalence of AMR. The group have explored similar projects in other centres (USA, Sweden and Germany) and plan to bring them together via a webinar in the spring to discuss further collaboration. Partners are needed to make a bid for funding, but the challenge might be over leadership. On the positive side both approaches are scalable, but the need is to get to the stage of making this concrete.

The second Erasmus+ project we’re engaged in, supporting informal carers (ICWE) is progressing satisfactorily with good input from local groups in Ireland, our main focus.

CEmPaC continues to convene a quarterly meeting of International Experts in Patient Empowerment, to share information about activity at the leading edge of this field. The material from the 2022 Roundtable has taken a while to prepare for publication but another opinion piece from Jim ‘the case for a community-based approachto patient empowerment’ was published in December in the journal ‘Self-care’ (SelfCare:2024;14(3):32-35).

i) The WEAll Irish hub (and related Brussels activities: such as the All Policies for a Healthy Europe group and the EU Wellbeing Economy Coalition). Both Caroline and David are active participants in the steering group of the all-Ireland hub. After our successful conference in Dublin the summer, there are further planned activities: webinars and also meetings of the Cultural Creatives community of practice. Although Sean has stepped back from some activities on health grounds, he still works with Caroline and David on regular joint EHFF and FEASTA podcasts, now in their fifth year.

ii) Health in the Wellbeing Economy Working group : during the last year EHFF has collaborated with WEAllGlobal (currently in the person of Aamirah Patel) to create a working group tasked to examine what health would look like in a wellbeing economy, in ordert o examine barriers to change and potential new configurations of societal wellbeing. A very constructive seminar took place at the Dublin conference (reported in the Summer Newsletter) and now webinars are planned for 2025 to explore the topic more via active engagement of interested parties.

iii) England WEAll hub development: activities are underway to create an effective steering group for this new enterprise, much anticipated. EHFF is playing a supportive role in the early stages of this project, providing liaison with both the All-Ireland and Scotland WEAll hubs.

On the farewell side, we’ve already reported the sad loss on Marius Buiting, one of the founders of EHFF (https://ehff.eu/a-sad-loss-to-our-community/ ). Time does march on (as my approaching big birthday reminds me) and in that context, Sean Conlan, another of our founding members, has had to more or less retire for medical reasons this year and his input will also be sorely missed, but we’re grateful for his contributions over the years.

Mike Bewick (see section below) who has added value to the Advisory group for sometime now has decided to move on, wanting to travel more and spend time with his extended family. We’ve very much appreciated him sharing his expertise.

• Digital education in healthcare at university level is still not well developed
• Leadership / Change management skills are not adequately taught
• The model that prevails is still the one of ill health that needs to be fixed. This is how students are being trained ,despite a well-established evidence base on the importance of disease prevention and of promoting wellness.
• What lacks is career advice for medical and nursing students. Lifelong learning, what other fields of healthcare are important (e.g. public health), what new roles will a future society attributeto physicians and nurses (e.g. the problem of academization).
• If you do not change the system, people will leave this system. It is not just about redesigning the number of medical schools or students, it is about redesigning the training environment
• We need to acknowledge the lack of medical infrastructure to do these things at the moment

Transforming healthcare education was identifiedin 2013 when we started, as one of the five major levers for change. Clearly there’s still a way to go! For EHFF the challenge is how best to facilitate change in one of the above areas.