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 22^nd  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 24^th 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 1^st 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 31^st 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 23^rd 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 30^th November-1^st 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.