As explained in our news item dated 5th June, the SCiE initiative is a voluntary project which follows on from collaboration between partners who completed the two tenders for the European Commission on self-care, PiSCE and PROSTEP (search the website for reports on the two closing conferences during 2017). The SCiE website: http://www.scie.eu identifies that the lead collaborators are DCHE, the Danish Committee for Health Education ( represented by Lars Munter), Third-I (Jacqueline Bowman), EHFF (David Somekh), CEmPAC (Jim Phillips), the Global Health Literacy Academy (Kristine Sorenson), the UK-based Self-Care Forum (Ian Banks) and the Selfcare Factory (SCFY) (Jan Smits).
After the DCHE hosted event in Copenhagen in April, SCiE is now launching the first ever European Self-care week (SCwE) during the week Nov. 12-18.
Prior to this, to launch this event, the SCiE self-care manifesto and the SCiE eBook ‘the future of self-care’ there was a meeting at the European Parliament on 08.011.18 organised by the SCiE policy lead, Jacqueline Bowman. The agenda for this is here. The slides from the meeting are here. The round-table meeting was hosted by two MEPs, Julie Ward (from UK), who is particularly concerned with social justice issues, a holistic view of health and women’s issues and Biljana Borzan (from Croatia) who campaigns on the importance of digital health. Also present were representatives of DCHE, SCFY and EHFF as well as NGOs such as EPF and EUFAMI. AIM represented the insurance sector and there were commercial representatives from RB (Reckitt Benckisere), Novartis and Samsung. Bert Vrijhoef, of Panaxea and the free university of Brussels, who had participated in the PROSTEP project, gave a short address linked to the ‘future of self-care’ report (for full text of the report see here. Sylvain Giraud, head of unit, health systems (Santé B1) was there for the Commission.
As well as launching the SCiE self-care manifesto Jacqueline Bowman introduced the group to the programme for the up-coming European Self-care week (full programme here) where she will play a major role in representing the other SCiE partners.
EHFF will play its part in promoting each day of the self-care week through social media. SCiE is a fledgling organisation, based on voluntary contributions from its partners and as yet has no formal legal status, but it is acknowledged by the EU Health Policy platform as a special interest group, which has attracted a substantial number of participants and SCiE aims to consolidate its activities during the coming twelve months.