Evaluation of Patient Willingness to Adopt Remote Digital Monitoring for Diabetes Management

A new year for patient empowerment and self-management: 2021 plans and opportunities!

EPF leads the work of COMPAR-EU on eliciting patients’ priorities and preferences. In this role, EPF works to identify patient-prioritised outcomes as reported in the literature for each of the four focus chronic conditions; through the same lens, EPF ensures that patient’s views, gender, and socio-economic dimensions are accounted for and guarantees meaningful patient empowerment across various project outputs and tasks.

To inform this work, EPF regularly engages a dedicated Patient Panel that advise with first-hand experience and expertise. Furthermore, EPF representatives are part of the COMPAR-EU IT Platform Task Force and EPF members are updated monthly on the project’s progress. Finally, in order to make the results of the project more accessible to non-expert audiences, EPF produces lay language summaries of key project documents.

Activities and Achievements of the Patient Panel in 2020

Before looking ahead, let us summarize what was done last year. In 2020, members of the COMPAR-EU Patient Panel (PP), together with EPF representatives, joined forces and focused their efforts on three key areas related to patient involvement and engagement:

  • Webinars and Workshops – regular webinars and two workshops where patient input onto project activity was taken on board;
  • COMPAR-EU Platform Task Force – members of the PP became part of the Task Force dedicated to the development, design, and implementation of the final project output;
  • Work on various project outputs and their translation into lay language continued.
We are confident that the Research Centre ‘Self-Management Europe’ will contribute to further strengthen patient empowerment.

EPF decides to join “Self-Management Europe” Research Centre

Over the years, EPF has done a tremendous amount of work in the field of self-management in chronic conditions. One of the best examples of this is the PRO-STEP project, an EPF-lead project that explored the added-value of self-management in chronic diseases in a context of promotion of self-care in European health systems, hence the decision of the EPF board to join this new initiative and continue the promotion and reinforcement of patient empowerment and self-management in Europe.

lyudmil

Lyudmil Ninov

Lyudmil is a Senior Programme Officer at EPF. He is in charge of project development, overall project management and policy research. Lyudmil holds a Bachelor degree in European Studies from the Sofia University in Bulgaria and a Master degree in European Studies from the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands. At EPF he has several key topics of expertise such as: self-management, patient involvement & digital health.

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Estefania Cordero

Estefania is EPF’s Project Communications Officer. Her work focuses on communicating project developments and results, participating in project communications work packages, and managing content coordination across platforms for all EPF projects. Prior to joining EPF, she worked at the European Commission’s DG Research and Innovation, and as a Health Policy Researcher.

The year ahead – what is coming up next for EPF in 2021?

Looking to the year ahead, EPF is planning a range of activities focused on communicating with patients. Mainly, EPF will continue to hold its quarterly webinars with the patient panel in order to validate project materials and consult on planned activities. In previous years, EPF produced 5 lay summaries of key project outputs. This year, the focus will be not only on translating those documents into the working languages of the project, but also producing infographics and short videos to support the dissemination of these materials. Lastly, as part of its work to ensure accessibility and sustainability, EPF will continue to contribute to the COMPAR-EU IT Platform testing, validation and review, which it has been participating in from the start of the proces.

Call for papers for a special issue

Dear  researcher or expert in the field of self-management,

The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH; ISSN 1660-4601, IF 2.849; Q1 (38/162) in Public, Environmental and Occupational Health (SSCI)) is currently running a Special Issue entitled “Implementation of Self-Management Interventions in Chronic Disease Care: Challenges and Lessons Learned”, with Dr. Monique Heijmans and Dr. Carola Orrego serving as Guest Editors. If you are working in the field of self-management and chronic diseases and have recent scientific output, we believe that you could make an excellent contribution. Thus, we are delighted to invite you to contribute to this Special Issue devoted to gathering evidence on experiences in chronic diseases; self-management; complex interventions; contextual factors; implementation research; etc.

For further details, please follow the link to the Special Issue website.

The submission deadline is 31 October 2021. You may send your manuscript any time now until the deadline as individual papers will be published on an ongoing basis. Submitted papers should not be published or under consideration for publication elsewhere. We also encourage authors to send a short abstract or a tentative title to the Editorial Office in advance (ijerph@mdpi.com).

IJERPH is fully open-access. Open access (unlimited and free access by readers) increases publicity and promotes more frequent citations, as indicated by several studies. Open access is supported by the authors and their institutes. An article processing charge (APC) of 2300 CHF (Swiss Francs) applies to papers accepted after peer review.

For further details on the submission process, please refer to the instructions for authors at the journal website.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Dr. Monique Heijmans,
Dr. Carola Orrego
Guest Editors