Who?

The MOCHA team is led by Professor Mitch Blair and Professor Michael Rigby from Imperial College London and involves 19 scientific partners from ten European countries: Cyprus, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Teams involved are also from Australia, Switzerland and the United States, who give a global perspective to European knowledge. In addition, 30 country agents seek out information from each European Member State and EEA country to innovative research questions.

What?

MOCHA appraises the differing models of child health that are used across Europe. The aim is to help every child benefit from optimum health care, the project performs a systematic, scientific evaluation of the types of health care that exist.

The project has already identified gaps in knowledge, including lack of data on surveillance of children’s primary care and children’s specific needs in primary care, lack of coordination of care, models of care that are not based on current child health epidemiology, and low prioritisation of children’s needs in e-health strategies. The project is addressing these gaps by innovative methods. More refined and reflective subsequent questions are addressed to the country agents and MOCHA partners have started a Delphi Process to discuss outputs on the innovative measurement tool to appraise these systems.

When?

The project began in June 2015 and will continue until November 2018. The project is funded by the European Commission through the Horizon 2020 Framework under Societal Challenges – Health, demographic change and well-being. This project on ‘Developing and comparing new models for safe and efficient, prevention oriented health and care systems’ was applied within Research and Innovation action.

Why?

Children’s health is important for Europe’s future which depends on good health care services. However, these are structured differently throughout the European Union. Until now there is no research which identifies the most effective model or elements of a model, which implies that some children are likely to be receiving suboptimal care.

What is AER’s role and how to get involved?

AER is a member of the External Advisory Board for this project and set up a focus group made of country agents, to follow the project developments closely, thus, to ensure AER members benefit from the results on key topics such as prevention, child healthcare, integrated care systems, big data, efficiency and effectiveness of primary child health care models.

You can find more information on MOCHA Project website.

Work Package 9 is now beginning which for collection of data from stakeholders in many countries regarding good practices in asthma care, sexual and reproductive health care, mental health care and vaccination. It would be a great opportunity to value your input into identifying facilitators or barriers to conduct good primary health care if you are from one of the following countries: Sweden, Italy, Poland, Germany, Cyprus, the Netherlands, Romania and Lithuania.