Dr David Somekh
It’s a while since we produced a Newsletter as during the six months since Easter we’ve concentrated on producing Bulletins looking at the impact or possible impact of the pandemic on healthcare systems and the wider society. However, we’ve not been idle on other fronts and this is a catch-up.
One of our ideas was to go out to members of the EHFF Community and ask them to share what of their current activities excites them. Everard van Kemenade was a friend from the Quality Improvement field prior to us starting up EHFF. Here is his contribution to the trawl of members’ passions – more from others to follow.
Meanwhile other topics covered in this edition are:
The future of Healthcare in Europe: at our AGM and strategy meeting in March we debated examining this topic via a full scale Scenarios exercise. In the end we settled on a less ambitious but still satisfying exercise, to use the Third Horizons methodology. To learn what that’s about and where we’ve got to, see below.
Progress of the CEMPaC Project in its final year of development: our major project on patient and community empowerment has its own website, where there’s more detail: here we’re providing a few headlines on current progress.
The Economy of Wellbeing: This is a new area for EHFF but the next stage in development of our holistic approach to health, beyond our interest in prevention and innovation in healthcare. We’re involved in a collaboration at EU level called ‘All Policies for a Healthy Europe’ (AP4HE) and we’ve also joined a large NGO, the Well Being Economy Alliance (WEAll). Read more below!
David Somekh, EHFF Network Director.
EHFF Members: In Their Own Words
Everard Van Kemenade
No.1 – Everard van Kemenade
I was born in 1953 in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, currently a centre of design with worldwide renown. I started as a university lecturer, researcher, consultant on Quality Management at Fontys University of Applied Sciences and worked in many countries in the world on quality management systems, like Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Ghana, Tanzania, Viet Nam, Romania, India and the Caribbean. I took my PhD in Certification, Accreditation and the Professional from the Rotterdam School of Management. I wrote books and articles for TQM Journal, Quality in Higher Education, and Quality Progress and others. I am director/owner of Van Kemenade Audit Coaching and Training. Besides, I am at the moment senior lecturer and researcher at the Master of Integrated Care Design, Utrecht University of Applied Sciences.
What is exciting me in my work at the moment?
A few years ago, I was puzzled by the difficulty of using the PlanDoCheckAct cycle, famous in healthcare as well, in times of continuous change. How can we plan and measure in such uncertainty? I became enticed by complexity theory in quality management and quality of care. My specific topic of research became ‘emergence’. Prof. T.W. Hardjono and I just finished a book: “The Emergence Paradigm: a way towards radical innovation”, to be published later this year. Currently, I research emergent leadership. How can leadership facilitate the emergence of (radical) innovation
? An important area for me to investigate is Integrated Care.
How might what I am doing relate to EHFF’s mission?
EHFF is “looking beyond the present crisis but also incorporating the lessons to be learnt from it, to promote a radical change of healthcare systems and the status of well-being in our society as a whole”. I strongly support the idea that radical innovation of healthcare is needed. I believe we need complexity theory thinking (more than just system thinking) to help
us to understand what exactly is needed and how to co-create the future. That requires embracing uncertainty and more attention to a process like emergence (the phenomenon where out of a network of interacting internal and external elements over time arises a coherent new pattern, that is unpredictable, unexpected, unplanned and irreducible to the separate parts). That also means we need Personalised and Integrated care. Our research and education might contribute.
Comment from the Editorial team: EHFF strongly endorses the spirit of Everard’s contribution. We absolutely agree that radical/transformational change requires new ways of thinking about how change in complex organisations can take place. Complexity thinking applied to social systems is not that new, but the application of these ideas over the last ten or fifteen years has proved challenging. Messy problems don’t have neat solutions!
The Future of Healthcare in Europe
https://www.h3uni.org/practices/foresight-three-horizons/ In fact this address, for H3Uni, also allows you to explore the history of the method and one of the ‘staff’ (it’s really an informal network) is Ian Kendrick who has been mentoring us through this process. The topic we chose was how the health ecosystem in Europe does or doesn’t integrate with other systems in society. 30 EHFF Community members answered the questionnaire, which produced 600 separate observations related to the three horizons. A team of seven from the advisory group have just finished clustering these responses and are now mapping them onto the three horizons framework and proceeding to the analysis phase. We hope to share the results by the end of October. It’s a classic foresight exercise. About time EHFF did some formal futures work!
CEMPaC Project: Progress Report
Jim Phillips
Our three and a half year project to set up a European centre for patient and citizen empowerment is making good progress, led by Jim Phillips, with support from Emma Loftus (admin.), Danni Brown (Marketing) and with some input from both David Somekh and the EHFF Communications team. For more detailed information about progress and access to the products developed so far the website URL is: www.cempac.org We’re highlighting here three important elements: firstly, we’ve started producing webinars on selected topics, both live but subsequently recorded for reference. There is one on Health Coaching, very soon (Sept. 23rd:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/health-and-wellbeing-coaching-expert-panel-tickets-118266796171) but if you want to see it and can’t get there in time, as we’ve said, a recording will be available shortly after).
The next on tackling loneliness via citizen empowerment will be run within the side-events to the European Week of Regions and Cities
https://europa.eu/regions-and-cities/side-events_en on October 7th and the Eventbrite link for tickets here is:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/reducing-loneliness-citizen-empowerment-expert-panel-tickets-121163819245 .
Another important component of progress – following our free teaching modules for citizen/patients, ‘Get Well, Stay Well’ which was launched last year – we’re about to launch the equivalent product for health professionals. We’re calling it ‘Coffee Break Learning’ as we’ve split the free course into five minute or so chunks, so that people can dip in and out of the menu. Lastly, we’ve set up a formal Expert group, gathering experts in the subjects of patient empowerment, health literacy and self-care from around Europe and the group are currently working on an action plan for the coming year.
The Economy of Wellbeing
EHFF has as a central component of its mission, a holistic approach to health and wellbeing in society. However, although it was an important principle or perspective, this year we’ve had a chance to address this directly, thanks to introduction from one of our Directors, based in Brussels, Agnieszka Daval. Early this year we joined a consortium ‘All Policies for a Healthy Europe’ (AP4HE). This has three work streams, on Digital, the Environment and on the Wellbeing Economy. For each a working group is preparing a policy paper aimed at influencing specific aspects of the European Commission’s current policies (for example, for Digital, the current focus on the digital data space, for the Environment, the ‘Farm to Fork’ and the ‘New Green Deal’ initiatives). The idea is that each policy paper will highlight the links to health and wellbeing in each area. EHFF members have joined all three working groups, Agnieszka for Digital, Sean Conlan for the Environment (respectively reflecting their expertise) and David Somekh has taken the chair of the Economy of Wellbeing group (with a lot for him to learn!). The policy papers will one on the AP4HE website by the end of the year: https://healthyeurope.eu/
The idea of the economy of well-being is to create indicators that better reflect the needs of society in the context of economic growth. Traditionally the wellbeing of a society was measured via GDP (gross domestic product) and associated economic measures, but for quite a while it has been recognised that these don’t capture the important interlocking components of the economy in any society, such as the health of the environment, education, health itself and social cohesion. Things that matter very much to most citizens. A few countries, like Scotland and New Zealand have developed sets of indicators which link the economy to these other essential areas and which can be used to guide policy. However, there’s no consensus across Europe about such measures and GDP remains the dominant measure.
A group that wants to change this are the Well-Being Economy Alliance https://wellbeingeconomy.org/ and EHFF has recently joined as an associate. We’re currently looking with them at participating in setting up a wellbeing alliance hub in Ireland.
Watch this space.