By Daniel Steenstra Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) is one of the important ingredients of the UK healthcare and political system that colludes to sabotage innovation. Over the years extremely promising and beneficial potential product, service and system innovations for UK healthcare, have ultimately failed. Recently and slowly, I am beginning to see how the odds were…
By Bernie Merkel I normally steer well away from personal anecdotes when writing about healthcare issues. I find that individuals’ experiences, however fascinating, upsetting or, even occasionally, uplifting they may be, inevitably present only a very limited, and often distorted view of the overall situation. But I am going to ignore my own rule and tell…
By David Somekh Ten years ago a group of us spent three days at a yacht haven, Nya Varvet, outside Gothenburg discussing the possibility of health, education and business in Europe working together to improve quality in healthcare. A striking outcome of the discussions was our discovery of similar processes going on in all three sectors.…
Newsflash – our faithful news item readers will be aware that we held the final conference for this project, which was a tender from DG-SANTE, in October 2017. As agreed the final report was submitted in January, but SANTE have only just given permission for there to be open access to the report, which is…
Final version of joint statement on Smart Healthy Age-friendly Environments (SHAFE) presented and published 12 November EHFF is one of a whole group of associated partners who supported the framework policy group on the above subject, which was led by Caritas Coimbra in the person of Carina Dantas and by Willeke van Staalduinen of AFE…
Metaphorum annual conference: Dusseldorf Nov.2-4. Having presented at the previous year’s conference in Liverpool and being interested in Stafford Beer’s model of viable systems, EHFF represented by Sean Conlan and David Somekh attended this year’s event with the aim of using the opportunity to present the EHFF project and seek reflections and suggestions on how…
By Bernard Merkel (EHFF community member) Fifty years ago the World Health Organization agreed the Alma Ata Declaration which among other things emphasized the key role of primary care within health system, not least to help achieve equity in health (which means, very crudely put, ensuring that everyone has fair access to healthcare resources) Since…
As explained in our news item dated 5th June, the SCiE initiative is a voluntary project which follows on from collaboration between partners who completed the two tenders for the European Commission on self-care, PiSCE and PROSTEP (search the website for reports on the two closing conferences during 2017). The SCiE website: http://www.scie.eu identifies that the…
The second meeting of our Robert Bosch Foundation funded project on patient empowerment (www.cempac.org) was hosted by our close colleagues, the Danish Committee for Health Education. The advisory group meets twice-yearly both to review the progress of the project but also to get advice from the experts on the Group and includes representation from both…
The interest for us of this meeting is that the Scirocco project has validated the maturity model that was developed by a group within the B3 integrated care action area of the European Innovation Platform on Active and Healthy Ageing, the area EHFF joined in 2013. We had, like others made a small contribution to…