Dear Collogues, as the summer holidays begin, we thought we would update you on some recent activities.
1. The end of the CEmPaC project: 
As some of you may know, this had been our biggest contract so far, funded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung for almost 500,000€ over four years, completed April 2022. Our preliminary discussions with RBS started in 2017, after Jim Philips and David Somekh were on the EPF steering team for the RBS funded year where EPF promoted policy and actions related to patient empowerment in Europe (2015/2016).
Our brief was to set up a virtual, easily accessible and not for profit European resource centre for patient and community empowerment which offered information to a variety of potential stakeholders, training and support pro bono but to try and ensure that the project was sustainable beyond the funding period. We’ve now agreed with RBS that this mission was fulfilled (and a detailed analysis of how the project performed against the original brief is available on application).
CEmPaC is shortly to be constituted as a Community Interest Company (not for profit) and will come out from EHFF’s umbrella, although David will remain one of the Directors for the new organisation to begin with. As a first step, through its International Expert group, there were two major events in mid-June, firstly, a four hour free conference on ‘Patient Empowerment in health and care, where next?’ with 9 speakers and a total of 90 participants lasting the whole session. Edited recordings of the sessions will be accessible on the CEmPaC website (or the EHFF LinkedIn page) shortly.
2. The Patient Empowerment Roundtable:
A report has now been produced which summarises outcomes. It will be circulated to the thirty participants in the original survey from two years ago. It runs to 20 pages plus appendices, but a short version can be provided on request. Essentially, we learnt a lot of lessons from this very intensive exercise, but we now have a detailed proposal for applying the concept of transformation catalyst in the health ecosystem. The proposal to work collaboratively with theFoundation for the next three years didn’t work out. While there was good will, their view of the kind of organisation that should carry this work forward differed from ours, in the end, although we worked hard together to find consensus.
Nevertheless, the project team feel very positive about the product we now have, and this was one of the topics discussed in our recent virtual strategy meeting, described in the final news
item, below. The project team are now looking to develop one crucial component of the proposal, namely a carefully designed communications model to convey the transformation concept clearly to a wider audience, in order to attract and engage them (we have in mind the Doughnut economy as an example). A final key task is to investigate which potential funder(s) might now be approached, but can’t be done until we have delivered the communications target just referred to. Watch this space!
4. An interim report from the EHFF annual Strategy Meeting:
To underline what we saw as most important to come out of this was, firstly as already noted above, the relevance of a complete review of the way we convey our identity to the outside world, based on how we’ve evolved in our thinking and actions over the last 10 years; and secondly to dig deeper into the crucial need to change our organisation’s structure, both to ensure sustainability but also to match our changing strategic agenda. These will be the two topics for our first face to face strategy meeting since the start of the pandemic, which we are now planning to convene in late October.