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You are here: Home / Archives for Project MOCHA

This is the tag for all posts relating to Project MOCHA.

Optimum healthcare for every child

27 June, 2018 By Editor

Launched in 2015, the Models of Child Health Appraised (MOCHA) is appraising the differing models of child healthcare that are used across Europe. This project, which aims to advise policy making and help every child benefiting from optimum healthcare, will be finalised end of 2018.

AER & the MOCHA project

Within this project, AER belongs to the External Advisory Board. Right from the start AER therefore set up a Focus Group on Child Health Care under the leadership of Dr Marta Tatar which aimed at following the project closely and channel findings to AER members in a continuous way. In this context the Focus Group met on the occasion of the 2016 Spring plenaries in Timis (RO) to hear about the ambitions of the MOCHA project and how the consortium would be operating to evaluate the different models of child health care in Europe.

As a result of its engagement in the project, AER was able to provide feedback on findings from the consortium and develop its network of potential project partners. AER Coordinator for Policy & Knowledge Transfer Johanna Pacevicius participated in the MOCHA annual general meeting and the advisory board meeting in Riga on 23-26 October 2017 to contribute to the project’s work and gather content for the work of the AER Committees.

The participation in MOCHA prove instrumental in the AER work on health innovation ecosystems. MOCHA researchers have contributed to several AER events and activities, in particular:

  • A workshop on stakeholder mapping for the developement of health innovation ecosystems was conducted during the AER autumn plenaries in Izmir (TR), together with Prof. Mitch Blair, project coordinator, from the Imperial College of London ;
  • Prof Michael Rigby spoke about “The Informal and Formal Virtual Care Team – Consent, Trust and Enablement in a Digital World” during the 2017 Artic Light E-health Conference  in Nordbotten (S).
  • AER organised a workshop on harnessing the potential of social capital for integrated care systems together with Prof Michael Rigby at the ALEC 2017 conference.
  • AER members exchanged with Dr Paul Kocken and Dr Maria Brenner on youth mental health in the framework of the development of an interregionnal project on this topic.

In 2017 AER published an update on the progress of the MOCHA project, one year later it is time to look at achievements.

Gathering & analysing data on child healthcare

During its second year of research, the MOCHA consortium started to gather and analyse their initial results on a variety of topics such as:

  • E-Health Policy for Children
  • Integration of health and social care for children with complex health conditions
  • Harmonisation of child health care in Europe
  • Child Migrant Health Policy
  • Measurement of the Strength of Children’s Primary Care
  • Equity in primary care health systems for children
  • Innovative measures of quality of care and outcomes of child primary care models

This was a particularly busy, fascinating and complex time, as they began to disseminate their initial findings, in numerous conferences and events and test theories with a number of different stakeholder groups. Primary care services for children are multidisciplinary, ever changing and very much based in the communities they serve. The project’s work packages are therefore working in multidisciplinary ways in order to really understand the different health systems in the European Union and EEA countries. At the same time, the MOCHA team have been discussing how these results are shaping the project’s ultimate aim of appraising the models of primary care to children.

Now in the final months of the project, the focus is on organising and analysing the results, not least the vast amount of data received from the MOCHA country agents. The consortium is also working on identifying health outcome measures to compare with the project results, and wrestling with the inevitable data challenges that anyone working on children’s public health will be familiar with.

The MOCHA team is already busy developing conclusions and disseminating results as well as forming productive relationships with other EU projects and the World Health Organisation, to spread the knowledge learnt in MOCHA to benefit primary care for children, and ultimately improve children’s health.

The newsletter from March 2018 presents in particular an E-Book showcasing conditions for implementation of examples of best practices in primary child health care in European countries.

Final conference

The final MOCHA conference will take place in the Hague (NL) on 15-16 November 2018. This concluding event will share the headline results, introduce the formal reports, and enable stakeholder discussion on next steps after the project’s conclusion. This will include presentations on key MOCHA findings:

  • Invisibility of Children in Data and Policy Systems
  • Measurement Challenges
  • Listening to Young People
  • Vulnerable Children and Equity
  • Delivering Complex Care
  • Patients and Primary Care Interfaces
  • School and Adolescent Health Services
  • Health Workforce in Child Health
  • Education of the Child Health Workforce
  • E-Health as the Enabler
  • Optimal Service Models

The way forward for primary child healthcare Health in Europe will require understanding child-centricity, as well as bringing MOCHA results to local services and contextualising into European and Professional Initiatives

For more information about this project, visit the MOCHA webpage on the AER website or the official MOCHA  project website. It is also possible to subscribe to the MOCHA newsletter or consult previous newsletters. The project’s publications also provide invaluable insights on the different topics researched and the consortium’s findings.

 

Photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash
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Updates on MOCHA project: events, newsletters and outcomes

21 April, 2017 By Editor

Time flies. The MOCHA project (Models of Child Health Appraised) team have already carried out many tasks and initiatives. Updates on the recent work has been published in March and AER wish to share it with member regions and partners. Moreover, in April the project reached its mid-point and initial results of the analysis carried out were presented at the 64th Working Group on the Quality of Childhood (QoC) hosted by MEP Hannu Takkula (Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, Finland) at the European Parliament on 11 April.

Newsletter March 2017: In January, the 18-Month report was submitted to the EC as a requirement of their funding and base for strengthening their inter-project working. MOCHA project was presented at ALEC – Arctic Light E-Health Conference on 1-2 February, in Lulea, northern Sweden. The DIPEx team carried out interviews of children and young people which provided a valuable insight into primary care service and had an International Meeting in London on 13th and 14th March to discuss data from interviews and to start the final DIPEx patient experience report. WP1 is coming to its end: the Final Report of D6 has been submitted to the EC in February. From now on, focus will be WP9 on producing evidence- based optimum models and a toolkit for improving primary care across Europe. WP5 was completed with a report on the Quality Measures and Data Sources Workshop, summarising the work done so far. The External Advisory Board had a meeting on 21st and 22nd  March in Malta for further progress of co-working between WPs: new joint WP groups were established. Further work will be the final conclusions at the end of 2018 as well as working on the dissemination of the first results.

64th QoC Workshop on “Primary Health Care for Children in Europe. Similarities and Differences between Countries – what do they Mean? Interim findings of the Models Of Child Health Appraised (MOCHA) Horizon 2020 Project” – WORKING GROUP ON THE QUALITY OF CHILDHOOD AT THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT (QOC):  it took place in Brussels on 11th April 2017 and it was aimed at presenting and discussing the initial findings of primary health care for children in Europe. The QoC Talk Session and its post session were about exchanges of these initial findings and reflections. Findings were presented by Professor Michael Rigby and Dr. Denise Alexander, respectively the Deputy Leader and Research Coordinator of the MOCHA project representing the lead partner, Imperial College London (UK). The discussion was led by Professor Michael Rigby and Michiel Matthes, Chairman of the Alliance for Childhood European Network Group. As a member of the External Advisory Board, AER attended the QoC Talk Session where we had the possibility to have fruitful exchanges with Ms Shanti George from the Learning for Well-being Community as well as with Ms Tinna Ros Steinsdottir from Eurochild Secretariat.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION IN A NUTSHELL

What is MOCHA project?

The project appraises the models of children’s health care through a number of different work packages. The varied combined approaches provide a rounded and robust analysis of the models of primary health care for children that exist in Europe. The disciplines encompassed by the project include medicine, nursing, economics, informatics, sociology and policy management. It is funded by the European Commission through the Horizon 2020 Framework, began on June 2015 and will continue until November 2018. AER is a member of the External Advisory Board and had set up a focus group to follow the project developments closely and ensure AER members benefit of it.

What are the aims and activities?

MOCHA project wish to help every child benefit from optimum health care, by performing a systematic, scientific evaluation of the types of health care that exist. To this extent, 20 scientific teams, from 11 European countries and Australia, Switzerland and the United States, were established. Gathering data and capturing current scenarios around primary care models were carried out in the first year. In the second year, the MOCHA team is analysing these data previously gathered from 30 countries of the EU/EEA via a country agent in each country.

Cohesion of different approaches and quality measures of optimal models of child primary health care are the goals of the project for a better-understanding and to avoid any cross-tensions between those. Different tasks were organised through 11 Work Packages and 64 internal deliverables, starting on 2015.

 

Do you wish to get an insight through the previous newsletters?

  1. Newsletter 2015 December: Researchers were recruited for the scientific team. Meetings and teleconferences of country agents, partners, guests and the External Advisory Board were held, starting in September. The first deliverable on designing guidelines, logo and the website to the European Commission (EC) was completed. Questions were sent out to all country agents to identify models of primary health care for child in October and December.
  2. Newsletter 2016 March: An internal workshop was organised in Rome on 24th February to further discuss measures of quality of child health models. In February, D2 ‘Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of the Literature’ was conducted by the CNR Institute of Neuroscience (CNR-IN) in Padua (Italy) to give an overview of a framework describing model type and key elements in EU Member States, Norway and Iceland as well as selecting different aspects of children’s primary care. The first scientific deliverable was submitted on 1st March 2016.
  3. Newsletter 2016 June: In April, the Slovakian country agent, Jozef Suvada (St Elizabeth University in Bratislava) hosted the External Advisory Board six-monthly meeting in which work packages worked together and identified synergies between each focus area. The Greek country agent, Dr Pania Karnaki represented MOCHA in Timisoara (Romania) at the meeting of the Assembly of European Regions (AER). AER has set up a focus group led by Dr Marta Tatar, County Councillor of Covasna (Romania), which follows the project. Updates on D2 were made by adding information on ASD and asthma in May. An internal literature review were also on 31st May for the first draft of the UML Modelling of health system processes (D6). Further meetings of internal deliverables were carried out for Work Package 1, 2, 4 and 5.
  4. Newsletter 2016 September: Internal deliverable meetings were carried out on D6 Current Models of Primary Care in May and WP5’s work led to the compilation and cataloguing the identified data sets in Europe. WP5 has resulted in the collaboration of MIROI database and the European Medical Information Framework (EMIF) project in order to create an online MOCHA repository on the EMIF platform. Deliverable 3 (7.1) and D4 (8.1) were both submitted to the EC. A workshop for WP9 was organised on 23rd August in Leiden (the Netherlands), hosted by Dr Paul Kocken, resulting in the validated optimal models of children’s prevention-orientated primary health care.
  5. Newsletter 2016 December: The second Annual General Meeting of the MOCHA project took place in Rome on the 20th October, hosted by the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities at CNR. The focus was on the increased collaboration between work packages. WP4 workshop was held for discussing and identifying the measures of quality and outcome that can be used by all research strands in the project in Padua (Italy) on the 10-11th October. WP5 has identified 147 anonymised case based primary care data sets in Europe.The focus of WP2 Workshop held on 30th November-1st December in Dublin was on how to appraise primary health care as well as how to extend our knowledge of the under-researched area of the interface between primary care services and other health services for children with complex care needs. By the end of November, D5 The Semantic Models of Key Clinical Conditions and Outcome Measures was completed to the EC.

Are you interested to attend the forthcoming events?

  • Conference of Medical Informatics Europe / Informatics for Health (24-26 April, Manchester) where Professor Michael Rigby, Dr Grit Kühne and Dr Daniela Luz will represent MOCHA project
  • MOCHA workshop on the Integration of health and social care for children with complex health conditions, an assessment of the policy and organisational context led by Dr Austin Warters from Trinity College Dublin at the International Conference on Integrated Care (8-10 May, Dublin)
  • European Health Management Association Conference on topics of Child Migrant Health Policy, E-Health Policy for Children, and Measurement of the Strength of Children’s Primary Care (13-15 June, Milan)
  • MOCHA workshop led by Professor Mitch Blair at the European Forum for Primary Care Conference (24-26 September, Porto)
  • DIPEx session on lessons learned about primary care from their interviews with children and young people at the International Society for Quality and Safety in Healthcare (ISQua) in London (1-4 October, London)

To lear more about MOCHA project and subscribe the newsletter, please visit MOCHA website.

The contact person at AER for MOCHA project is Johanna Pacevicius.

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Committee 2 takes a closer look at the health of refugees

14 November, 2016 By Editor

At their plenary meeting in Izmir on 9 November 2016, Committee 2 took a closer look at the challenges facing regions for tackling the health of refugees. The work on this topic was initiated in September this year when AER President Dr Hande Özsan Bozatli visited Saint-Pierre University Hospital in Brussels to raise awareness on the issue. The visit crystallised the numerous challenges that medical practitioners face to provide care to asylum seekers and the need to share expertise among regions.

Committee 2 took advantage of their presence in Izmir to hear from Ms Fatma Sıla Asıbostan, Health Care worker at ASAM, Multi Service Center for Refugees. She highlighted the specific needs of asylum seekers in Izmir which include providing information and training, with interpreters but also automatic vaccination upon arrival. She confirmed what was already confirmed by doctors in Brussels that refugees do bring diseases that are less common or sometimes non existant in their new country.

AER Committee 2 President, Ms Agneta Granström (Norrbotten-SE) also gave an overview of the integration process of migrants in Norrbotten stressing that “migration is an opportunity to improve our societies, especially in Sweden, so our greatest challenge is not migration itself, but the most effective way to integrate these people. As health can be a barrier for integration, we pay special attention to develop migration-sensitive health systems”. Ms Granström presented some of the concrete outcomes policies in place for the 6000 asylum seekers in Norrbotten which include a health examination, information in their own language, training for health care professionals, etc.

Prof. Mitch Blair, Professor of Paediatrics & Child Public Health from the Imperial College London (UK) presented some of the outcomes and lessons from the MOCHA (Models of Child Health Appraised) project. The project aims at building a picture of what type of health care for children exists in all 30 EU/EEA countries. MOCHA is a European project, funded by European Union (EU) within the Horizon 2020 program.

In August 2016, MOCHA produced a study entitled: “Migrant Children in Europe: Entitlements to Health Care” and reads “Research has shown that asylum-seeking and newly-settled refugee children have high rates of stress-related mental health problems during the first years after resettlement, with unaccompanied minors having the highest rates of symptoms. Infectious diseases and poor dental health are more common in these children than in settled European populations and many have an accumulated need of preventive and basic health. Thus, access to health care is a major concern for migrant children.”

 

Read the full MOCHA report on migrant children

MOCHA website: http://www.childhealthservicemodels.eu/

MOCHA Models of Child Health Appraised

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