Date: 15 June 2013
EHFF Director David Somekh attended the B3 Action Plan for Integrated Care in Chronic Diseases at Brussels (Committee of Regions) on June 7th on behalf of the Network for Self-management/Patient Empowerment.
E7 June Agenda of the B3 Action Plan group is available for download.
The Network now has 18 organisational members from across Europe and following the submission of the tender bid under the 2013 SANCO work plan on self management in chronic conditions, the Network has adopted the acronym EMPATHiE (EMpowering PATients in their Health in Europe).
A complete list of the current members is available.
This was the first meeting of the B3 group since acceptance of the new round of commitments, of which our Network was one. The number of organisations and regional groups has increased from about 60 to about 165.
The B3 Action Plan describes the development of the project from the project plan of November 2011, first call for commitments ending May 2012 and formal launch in November 2012. The section on patient empowerment is described in detail on page 16 and comprises essentially two parts:
- a mapping exercise of coaching, education and approaches which support empowerment and improve patient adherence and compliance, to be completed by December 2013;
- and a toolkit for patient empowerment and compliance to be ready by December 2015.
After presentations from the 7 subgroups, each group met in parallel for discussions of progress and future plans. The coordinator of AA6, the PE subgroup, is Dr Francesca Avolio from Puglia: f.avolio@arespuglia.it.
There are two further documents relevant to AA6:
a desktop search template for AA6 ( EMPatiE_Desktop_Search); and
a template for gathering case studies ( EMPatiE_Template).
Finally, as a pointer to work already done, David Somekh has a hard copy of a compendium of good practices collected for the whole of B3 during March-April 2013. It is notable that an overview of the 90 or so examples indicates that they are contributed by only six countries, three with very strong regional representation: Spain, Italy and Germany, with Denmark, Netherlands and UK (actually Scotland).
There are clearly real opportunities to contribute to this work.
It is slightly unfortunate that the chosen communication mechanism is not totally transparent. Yammer has been adopted as a Facebook style means for all members of B3 activities to communicate and in order to join this closed group, please email Donna Henderson, who leads communication for B3 and administrates the site. Members of the Network are strongly encouraged to join the Yammer group.
Donna had been given a full list of the EMPATHiE network members. Her email is: donna@antaraconsulting.co.uk.
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