In our EHFF Newsletter, posted October 23rd, I promised a review of EHFF’s changing view of the future over the 15 years or so that EHFF has identified as a futures organisation. Here’s the fifth of the levers for change in the process of healthcare transformation that we had identified.
Health and wellbeing
As more governments seek to shift beyond gross domestic product (GDP) as the dominant measure of progress, the concept of a “wellbeing economy” has gained traction. This approach prioritizes human and environmental wellbeing through broader, more holistic policy frameworks.
EHFF joined a European Commission based NGO, the AP4HE (All Policies for a Health Europe) in 2020 as one of a dozen or so knowledge partners. DS was subsequently encouraged to chair a working group to write a policy paper on the wellbeing economy, the latter being featured prominently when Finland had had the Presidency of the European Council at the end of 2019. Our paper was eventually published in 2021: see (https://ehff.eu/16094-2/) . It contributed to a broader statement by the group on health and wellbeing (https://healthyeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/European-Health-and-Well-being-Deal-I-All-Policies-for-a-Healthy-Europe-4.pdf ). Unfortunately, this lobbying group ran out of funds soon after.
However, we at EHFF were very motivated by the notion of system change in the economic model, that better served the needs of society as a whole, as EHFF was already engaged with our primary task related to necessary system change in European Healthcare. Therefore, very quickly after finishing the 20/21 paper, we agreed to join the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll: https://weall.org/) with the support of FEASTA, the Irish environmental sustainability group with which we already had a working relationship through our shared podcasts.
In 2021 Caroline Whyte, David Somekh, Sean Conlan, Davie Philip (from Cloughjordan and Cultivate), Peter Doran from Queens University, Belfast and others, after considerable planning, officially launched the all-Ireland WEAll hub (https://weall.org/hub/ireland ) in 2022. The key issue we felt was getting the message across. Bearing in mind contextual issues in the Island of Ireland the original means chosen was via the creative arts, using the collective unconscious of a learning set of Irish artists to stimulate the public’s imagination (the idea of ‘cultural creatives’, had been launched in North America in 2000: see Wikipedia article).
Caroline Whyte, for the hub steering group, summarises the work of the all-Ireland hub in this Newsletter at the beginning of 2023 (https://weall.org/update-from-the-weall-ireland-hub ) and following, apart from inspiring talks on the web, there was an in-person meeting of the cultural creatives group, which EHFF also attended, at the model village in Cloughjordan in June 2023. Following that event, Davie Phillip, for the WEALL hub team drafted this note:
“First, we want to thank you for your participation, your voice, and your continued work. The conversations on narrative, indigeneity, ecological storytelling, community, and future orientations were rich and inspiring.
We hope to keep building this proto community of practice, aimed at catalysing a Wellbeing Economy: a new rhythm, a new velocity, a new tempo, and we hope you want to continue to be involved.
Links to previous WeAll Ireland Hub webinars:
We have a number of previous webinars which have featured guests such as Tim Jackson, Kate Raworth, David Bollier, Katherine Trebeck, Mary Murphy and Sandra Waddock amongst many other brilliant speakers. You can check them out by following the links below.
- Idir Dhá Chultur: Prof. Peadar Kirby, Prof. Mary Murphy, and Dr. Eóin Ó Cuinneagáin explore the decolonisation of our ‘social imaginary’ – the capacity to imagine radically different social futures and realise them – through the lens of the Irish experience, language(s) and culture.
- Transformational catalysts and the role of the artist / creative in social change: Sandra Waddock speaks on the power of narrative change in stimulating the collective imagination around the wellbeing economy.
- Building the Commonverse and the Ontological Shift it Requires: David Bollier on the role of the commons at the heart of our vision for the wellbeing economy, and as a modus operandi for our community of practice.
- The Art of Well-being Economy by Tim Jackson: Introduced by Caroline Whyte and chaired by Peter Doran, this presentation by Tim Jackson describes how art can inform societal transformation with responses from Jo Mangan, David Bollier, and Marina Gattás.
- Breakdown or Breakthrough: Catalysing the Well-being Economy: Kate Raworth, Katherine Trebeck, and Jennifer Wallace discuss the need for a new economic model, how Doughnut Economics can inform a Well-being Economy, and the work of communities in informing this emerging economy. “
In September of that year, David Somekh gave a talk for WEAll on Health and the Wellbeing Economy (recorded on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acGjDZuKsOA ). The following year, 2024, the Irish WEAll hub convened a very successful conference at Trinity College, Dublin, with the help of the economics department there, with over 200 attendees. A summary of the event is here: https://rethinking-growth.ie/ . During the conference David Somekh held a seminar on health with speakers including Dr Tony Holohan, former Chief Medical Officer of Ireland and Suzanne Costello, Chief Executive of the Irish Institute for Public health.
Following the talk in Autumn 2023, mentioned above, EHFF had started discussing with WEAll Global the idea of starting a WEAll working group on Health, co-chaired by David Somekh for EHFF and Aamirah Patel for WEAll Global. Starting in April 2024 the working group debated the best way to advance this area, which it was agreed, was somewhat under-represented in the WEAll literature. Eventually they decided that there should be a series of webinars entitled ‘the place of health in the Wellbeing Economy’ with a view to creating a consensus statement on the subject. The first, from April 2025 was entitled ‘why the economy is bad for your health and what to do about it’ the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxzwhx5KT-c and the second in the series was about the relationship between society and the planet, in June 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOwUze3G9w8 .
More webinars and the statement to follow.
The future of health and wellbeing?
Although things are starting slowly, people are beginning to get the idea of a more holistic view of health and what it means in society. As stressed in the 2023 webinar, referring to Socrates’ notion of a good life (Eudaimonia), this is ultimately a moral or value-driven issue. On the WEAll website, these values are spelled out as dignity, respecting and nurturing nature, the common good, fairness, and active citizen participation. These values are fairly easily translated in the service of health and healthcare.
As noted in the same webinar, there are powerful forces maintaining the status quo, which ultimately are anti-life; the drive for possessions above personal relationships and a kind of callousness or insultation from human feelings which stems from a two-dimensional, target driven and money-oriented lifestyle.
To change these things requires a sea-change in society, so that the wellbeing economy may well seem a pipedream or some kind of unreachable ideal, but as has been stressed during the webinars that the Heath group are producing, small changes do happen, beneath the surface and at variance with the current trends. Our objective is to expand or magnify them. This will not be a fast process.