Feeling alright, Doc?
If you aren't, then luckily help may be on the way. As of spring 2019, Clinical Health Promotion Centre in Copenhagen is part of a Horizon2020 EU project about burnout prevention and well-being among staff in hospitals. The projedct application has reached stage II - so, fingers crossed for those of us who feel the pressures on our health systems first hand.
The aim of the EU project is change both at hospital and European level. Main parterns participating are placed in Germany, Catalonia, Netherlands and Denmark.
At hospital level
At hospital level, and for each of the five large European university hospitals taking part, the project will assess the prevalence of well-being, burnout and professional engagement of staff as well as related productivity and other economic costs. It will also develop an integrated organizational strategy, with stakeholder buy-in, that addresses identified risks, combining existing interventions in each site with newly provided evidence-based organizational interventions. The project will then implement the evidence-based organizational strategy. Finally, the project will test the organizational intervention for its impacts, identify barriers and facilitators etc., look at costs and absenteeism etc.
At European level
At European level, the project will assess the extent to which mental health problems and lack of engagement among health professionals in secondary health care are perceived important by hospital managers, develop an inventory of existing organisational policies and programmes and existing routine data collection. It will also assess individual European hospital staff perceptions and and look at ways to potentially improve. In the end, the project will result in a “how-to” step-by-step toolkit for implementing the intervention, policy dialogue, work within existing networks (such as HPH) and implementation of European-wide awareness raising, dissemination and exploitation strategies.
The potential role of HPH hospitals
"This is a very important and relevant project within the field of HPH," says CEO of the Clinical Health Promotion Centre, Professor Hanne Tønnesen. She continues to say that: "HPH networks and member hospitals in Europe could also end up playing a crucial part in the project itself as data collection and dissemmination participants together with other networks in the field."
Possibility for financing
According to Professor Tønnesen, the Clinical Health Promotion Centre in Copenhagen may even be able to finance data collection in European HPH hospitals. While she doesnt make any promises yet, she does say that: "We're in the special situation that we could end up being able to finance local data collection in European networks/hospitals at least to a certain degree - provided the stage II application goes through."
Further info on the project
The Clinical Health Promotion Centre will be informing the leadership of national/regional HPH networks about the project and its possibilities in more detail at the Warsaw meeting of the HPH General Assembly in May 2019. But, until then, Professor Tønnesen says: "If you can say already now that you have hospitals in your national/regional HPH network that would be interested, then do let us know, so we can get a gauge on the initial interest."
Wanna start feeling better?
Sign up for the project emailing list using the form on this page.