On December 10th, Corinne Hinlopen, global health advocate at Wemos, presented the project Action for Health and Equity Addressing medical Deserts (AHEAD) at an online EU-wide conference, attended by over 60 researchers, health professionals and policy makers, including from the Directorate-General SANTE. The lively engagement with the audience provided additional inspiration for the project partners. The conference was organised to showcase the three European Commission funded projects on medical deserts that have started during 2021.
Corinne presented results from the initial literature review and discussed the complexities in identifying medical deserts in their specific context. She also highlighted the unique features of the AHEAD project. “Our focus on ‘lived realities’, by specifically including the experiences of affected communities in the identification of medical deserts; the multi-stakeholder approach to formulating feasible and acceptable policy measures to mitigate and prevent medical deserts; and the ambition to build a Medical Deserts Diagnostic Tool and a Medical Deserts Network. These all make our project unique in its kind.”
You can watch the recording of the conference