Sounds like an oxymoron (a contradiction in terms – you knew that, didn’t you), but our colleague from the Danish Centre for Health Education, Lars Munter who invited EHFF to provide an ending keynote at this meeting is also a Director of the not-for-profit organisation CSR-Link which looks at Corporate Social Responsibility activities of large companies. This event having a health focus, it was interesting indeed to hear from the oceanographer, Prof. Katherine Richardson of Copenhagen University who is part of the UN Expert panel tasked with reviewing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and reporting back in 2019. Unfortunately she didn’t make her slides available but a thought piece that includes an interview with her is accessible on the CSR-Link site: http://www.csr-link.dk/2017/11/09/sustainable-sinners/
The full programme for the day is here. We’ve selected four other presentations. Firstly, representing Pharma themselves, from LEO Pharma, describing their work on co-production with patients in the dermatology field (slides here). Secondly from the NEXT agency, part of the Danish Governments innovation strategy, which looks at public-private partnerships to facilitate high quality research input into the development and testing of new drugs (slides here).
Then ‘a word from our sponsor’. Novo Nordisk, a huge Pharma company is able also to fund a very large Foundation dedicated to providing support for medical research and also social and humanitarian projects world-wide. Thomas Aslev Christensen, Director of Operations for the Foundation provided an overview of their work (slides here).
There was also an interesting presentation from a large insurance company SKANDIA, on an employee screening programme designed to help improve the overall health of the workforce by a combination of screening and disease prevention methods.
Finally David Somekh gave an overview of health futures as EHFF sees them, stressing the difficulties Pharma, Tech Companies and Health Providers share in responding to rapid change and balancing innovation against other counteracting pressures, in particular financial constraints (either lack of resources or excessive focus on share-holder interests). His slides are here.
EHFF is currently exploring with CSR-Link the possibility of further partnership activity.