Dear friends and colleagues from the EHFF Community. This year has been one of Zoom and Microsoft Teams burn-out for sure. Very sad we’ve not had the chance to meet face to face. Nevertheless, despite the constraints, it seems a lot has been accomplished.
As you can see from the features page on the website (or our YouTube channel) we put on 15 webinars between February and October for Ubiquity University in their Humanity Rising Series. These webinars were curated by Lars Munter (representing for these events the Nordic 2030 movement) and myself for EHFF, and our topic was the transformation of the European health ecosystem. In addition, our project CEmPaC, managed by Jim Phillips and Danni Brown, put on half a dozen webinars also, some in collaboration with IFIC Ireland (the International Forum for Integrated Care).
CEmPaC are being funded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung until next March to support them becoming self-sufficient, when the structural relationship with EHFF going forward will need to have been sorted out, but currently they are engaging with the NHS Personal Care Institute as part of the latter’s extensive training programme for NHS staff, which finally kicked off in November.
Meanwhile a major preoccupation for EHFF has been the continuation of the Three Horizons scenario project on the transformation of the health ecosystem, which we began nearly 18 months ago. This has recently attracted the attention of the Johnson & Johnson Foundation who agreed in October to provide seed-funding for six months to allow us to develop a more substantial proposal for a three year project, putting into practice the indicators for change the project has started to highlight. This work we are doing also has implications for the future and purpose of EHFF overall.
Lastly, although not the only other thing we’ve been doing, EHFF this year has been ‘walking the talk’ as a health focused NGO with a holistic approach. Arising from our previous work with the All Policies for a Healthy Europe group, we became partners of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll) and, along with other colleagues in Ireland, have set up WEAll Hub Ireland which promises to be a challenging but rewarding project as it develops.
Lots more to talk about, but that can wait until the New Year! Have a good break.
David Somekh on behalf of the EHFF Board.