Futures from past to present
As I hand over the role of Network Director of EHFF to Lars Münter, he has invited me to write a review of EHFF’s changing view of the future over the 15 years or so that EHFF has identified as a futures organisation.
Interestingly, this led me down a trip down memory lane to find both path, present, and future interlocked in constant evolution. And in a series of chapter, I will try to share some of these key reflections with you as you proceed towards new initiatives and experiences of this particular complex experience of evolution of health.
A retrospective beginning
A couple of years ago we published on the EHFF website a ten-year retrospective of our activities from 2013, when we became a legal identity (our previous activities were carried out under the banner of the European Society for Quality in Healthcare (ESQH) and most of the founder members of EHFF were on the Board of this previous NGO). You can access this retrospective here: https://ehff.eu/latest-newsletter-a-retrospective-of-ten-years-work/
The current health and healthcare system in Europe is not sustainable. This issue and how it might be tackled was the fundamental consideration that led us to set up EHFF. Put more bluntly, the current system is broken and no longer fit for purpose and attempts to fix it are like moving the deckchairs on the Titanic – doomed to fail.
Therefore, having spent a number of years at ESQH as one of the NGO advisors to the health systems group of the European Commission we concluded that institutional barriers meant that the pace of change was far too slow, given the urgency of the situation (not acknowledged 15 years ago, but increasingly so, now) and we proposed an ‘outside the box’ approach to influencing, using futures methodologies.
Truth is, the respected Don Berwick and colleagues from the Boston Institute for Healthcare Improvement had sounded the alarm as early as 1999 but although it was acknowledged and accepted by (some ) professionals, there was virtually no impact on policymaking on either side of the Atlantic.
Having embraced the principles of both the Foresight approach and scenario planning (the Shell approach) as described in the retrospective (see the link above), we’ve used these approaches to examine the four levers for change that we had identified in 2013: patient empowerment (changing the relationship between citizen and healthcare professional), innovation (tackling institutional resistance), eHealth (maximizing utility) and transforming healthcare education (probably the most difficult) to see how our view of possible futures has changed.
It is these four key levers that you can find summarized, analysed, reflected, dissected, and collated in the coming four chapters that I will write and add to via our website. It has been a pleasure to experience them, to relive them, and to now enable you all to continue this journey.