Beyond Health

Our vision

EHFF is a partnership organization which seeks to transform healthcare and improve the well-being of European citizens by highlighting and addressing prominent factors impacting health and wellness.

What Impacts Health?

We adopt four main perspectives;

Systems

Climate

Societal Trends

Justice

A Systems Perspective

Our debt-based monetary system and the related growth-based economic model focus on production and consumption patterns which often lead to meaningless work, increased stress, pollution, destabilised ecosystems and social injustice. Sustainability of systems is being given attention to but most often via a silo approach rather than across all aspects of society.

Biodiversity collapse and the impact of Climate Change

Modern food production, consumer demands and urban developments are critical drivers of changes in climate, pollution, loss of natural habitats and ultimately the collapse of biodiversity in the natural world. All of these have potentially negative impacts on health and demand consideration in health-related policy/activity. Equally, there needs to be a greater acknowledgement by business and by educators of the impact of their actions on societal health.

Societal turbulence

There is an increasing level of anxiety – from individual to group existential angst – across the world, particularly among younger people and those in areas of most risk. Typically, this is due to the impact of changing climate coupled with increasing political instability and worrying extremism, with associated social discord. Elsewhere regional volatility and high levels of poverty contribute to the mass movement of populations, the impact of which further exacerbates social tensions within Europe.

Equity and Social Justice

A holistic model of health embraces issues of social justice, ethics, philosophy and democracy. There is good evidence of widening inequality in social and health status across Western society. Increasingly sophisticated technology has the potential to improve health but risks causing further inequity through social differences in education and access. Current healthcare models based as they are on nineteenth-century approaches to social organisation also tend to disadvantage the most deprived and vulnerable.

Our actions

We create, collect and share evidence on the impact on health of these ‘Beyond Health’ factors such as the economic system, emerging technologies, and issues of social justice and ethics.
We identify and analyse local initiatives that aim at creating healthy communities as part of our horizon scanning activities.
We make linkages with two broad sets of organizations outside health:
- systems thinking organizations – primarily in the area of developing sustainable resilient communities and society
- analytics thinking organisations – focusing on competence/tools and methods, in such areas as cybernetics, participative democracy and community empowerment.
We engage in conversations with key opinion leaders and politicians about the interconnections between health and other systems.
As a network organisation, we connect health sector players with other initiatives/sectors/organisations.
Through EC funded projects and via alliances with other NGOs, we formulate recommendations on how EU and local policies could further the goal of healthy societies and healthy citizens.
We communicate about “Beyond Health” through events, podcasts projects and collaborations.