EHFF has had a friendly association with London-based APF for several years, through its co-manager, Nick Price of UCL. We may well hold a joint event in the latter part of 2016. This is a brief report of an APF meeting held with the POST horizon scanning group. POST is the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology and is described as ‘Parliament’s in-house source of independent, balanced and accessible analysis of public policy issues related to science and technology’. The actual session on Nov. 20th was an exercise for the group in using their latest product, a set of horizon scanning trend cards. However, for EHFF the interesting lesson was that there is a library of ‘POSTNOTES’ each of which are about 4 sides of A4 and represent an analysis of a policy issue on which to brief Parliamentary committees etc.
The website is: www.parliament.uk/post and if you then go to Publications, you’ll find a browse-able Directory of POSTnotes by topic area. Taking one of the Health notes as an example here (this one on Sugar and Health), they seem to be of high quality. EHFF wonders if there are similar publically available health –related trend analyses in other EU countries.