EHFF will be four years old in March 2017, when we will be holding our AGM in Dublin.
Since establishing ourselves we have successfully participated in a number of European Commission projects. This is a strand of work which gained us the momentum so that we could start doing projects independent of the Commission to enable us to extend our range of activity in the direction of our Mission; where our overall interest is in transformational change of European society, using a holistic perspective of health as a starting point.
Our first success was to get funding from the Bosch Foundation at the beginning of 2016 for a project on user involvement in eHealth design, and the report of that piece of work will be available shortly. We now hope to bid for two much larger projects, one on patient empowerment (setting up a European resource centre with our partners ENOPE) and the other on barriers to uptake of eHealth resources affecting end-users (both citizens and professionals).
Our other preoccupation this current year has been in developing an effective communication strategy. One facet of our work is Making Conversations – this is part of the Foresight approach to futures work but we are discovering that it is also an important aspect of developing the potential of our network(s). Taking the latter as a starting point, we hope to stage a major event involving as many of our Community members as possible in the New Year, building on our experience from the Gatwick event of nearly two years ago.
As a preliminary to this, starting in early December we are approaching people individually to review their CVs for the website and this will assist us in the development of the 2017 work plan, where communication will play an important role.