AHEAD

We shared interesting and innovative ideas to tackle medical deserts and improve access to healthcare in the different countries, such as investing in mobile health services, setting up a taskforce for medical deserts, and making the region more attractive for general-practitioners to live in.

We were also delighted that Katarzyna Ptak-Bufkens (Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety, European Commission) joined us and reflected on the policy options presented by our country representatives. She emphasized the importance of contextualization of country-specific policy solutions, as there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution, given the differences between the countries. “We should measure better and get a better understanding of medical deserts, involve the right stakeholders in the policy solutions, shape and support our health workforce, and evaluate the policy solutions,” she concluded. She also emphasized that our project findings are critical as feedback for the EU’s work on health workforce planning and country-specific activities.

Our speakers were:

Moderator:
Aysel Rahimli – project coordinator for AHEAD (Wemos, Netherlands)

Reflections by:
Katarzyna Ptak-Bufkens (Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety, European Commission)

Presentations by:

Bianca Ferraiolo – Head of the Representative Office to the EU (Cittadinanzattiva, Italy)
Corinne Hinlopen – Project officer for AHEAD (Wemos, Netherlands)
Dana Farcasanu – Medical doctor and Executive President (Center for Health Policies and Services, Romania)
Milena Santric Milicevic – Prof Social Medicine (University of Belgrade, Serbia)
Sergiu Otgon – Human resources for health expert (National Public Health Agency, Republic of Moldova)

We look forward to the final AHEAD webinar in May. Stay tuned for more information soon!

AHEAD Newsletter #9 2023

by AHEAD | Feb 28, 2023 | News

EU Health Workforce Projects Cluster meeting: joining our strengths for health workforce strengthening

On January 25^th, the first in-person EU Health Workforce Projects Cluster meeting took place at the Nivel office in Utrecht, Netherlands. Representatives of all projects involved in the Cluster – AHEAD, METEOR, OASES, ROUTE-HWF and TASHI – got together to discuss our joint strengths, synergies and collaboration opportunities, to achieve our joint goal: strengthening the health workforce in Europe.

We had fruitful discussions, sharing our project results and interesting findings so far, and discussing ways to move forward. For example, we concluded that joint events at conferences create dissemination opportunities – e.g. the European Health Management Association (EHMA) conference in June, in Rome. We also see opportunity to present our work (of all projects) at a joint EU Health Workforce Cluster event. Stay tuned for more information soon!

Evaluating AHEAD: survey

With a few more months to go until our project ends, the AHEAD team is currently conducting our end of project evaluation, with the aim to explore the effectiveness, efficiency and relevance of our activities. We are therefore reaching out to all stakeholders, and anyone who has followed our work since the start of the project (e.g. through webinars). Your input would be extremely valuable for us to understand the impact of our project and to better plan our future work to address medical deserts. We would therefore greatly appreciate it if you could take 5 minutes of your time to fill out our survey. Thank you in advance!

Webinar on March 15: what are viable policy options to effectively tackle medical deserts?

Join our next webinar on March 15! We will share and discuss policy options to effectively tackle medical deserts that we gathered from our participatory consensus-building workshops with stakeholders in Italy, Moldova, the Netherlands, Romania and Serbia.

Date: Wed March 15, 2032
Time: 1400 – 15:00 PM (CET)
Language: English
Location: Zoom – please register here.

Watch our webinar about our participatory consensus building methodology

On January 27^th, we organised a webinar about our participatory consensus-building methodology, led by our partner VU Athena Institute. Our AHEAD partners shared their experience with applying our methodology in workshop sessions with stakeholders in areas affected by medical desertification in Italy, Moldova, the Netherlands, Romania and Serbia, to increase the chances of identifying locally owned and sustainable policy solutions to counteract medical deserts and related health workforce challenges. It was an interactive webinar with interesting discussions and questions from the audience! In case you missed it or would like to watch it again, please watch the recording on YouTube.

Our results so far…

The added value of our work and research on medical deserts lies in what makes AHEAD unique: our Medical Deserts Diagnostic Tool and our participatory consensus-building methodology. In addition, we recognize the importance of contextualising the tool and methodology to come up with effective policy, as each context and situation is different. In case you missed them before, have a look at our tool, consensus-building methodology, country research in Italy, Moldova, the Netherlands, Romania and Serbia, and our EU level research.