For EHFF as for other European NGOs and their academic and business associates, the period from August to October can be an intense time because of deadlines for bidding for Commission projects for the following year.
For us, this year has been no exception. We can reveal (as the deadlines are now all past) that, as in previous years, EHFF has been a partner (albeit, with these particular large-scale projects i.e. involving several million euros, a relatively minor player) in a number of bid consortia, with the accompanying frenzied activities associated with jointly putting a bid together. We now all wait until next year to see whether there has been success or at least, if the project involves a two-stage bid process (giving an idea of just how many bids there may be for one pot of money) whether we’ve made it to the next round.
In the last two months then, we’ve completed bids with big consortia on two Horizon 2020 projects, one on mental health in the workplace and the other on promoting good breast-feeding practices. In the quite separate domain of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), we’ve contributed to a bid related to application of block chain technology in healthcare (largely but not exclusively focused on clinical drug trials). Finally there have been bids called for the policy framework topics for the European Health Policy Platform (EUHPP) for 2019 that we, along with as many as a 100 other European NGOs, belong to. Several of us (picking out specifically DCHE, and EPF, long-time partner organisations of ours, but also the Global Health Literacy Academy, run by our colleague Kristine Sorenson) put together a bid on patient empowerment and health literacy.