Speaker

Nicola Bedlington

Presentation title

Valuing Patient Involvement - A European Perspective

Presentation outline

The presentation will describe the intrinsic value of promoting patient involvement, patient empowerment and the patient centred healthcare model. Drawing on concrete examples of policy advances and ‘state of the art’ projects at both European and national level, the speaker will outline why this must be inherent to healthcare systems of the future to ensure they are financially sustainable, inclusive, equitable and quality-oriented and how this could be achieved in practice –and why we need to achieve an effective balance between prevention, health promotion and chronic disease management strategies that puts the patient first.

Job title

Executive Director European Patients' Forum

Biography

Nicola Bedlington is British and was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland

She studied business and human resource management in the UK. She lived for almost 10 years in Brussels, and has lived near Geneva for the last 10 years.

Nicola was the first Director of the European Disability Forum, an umbrella organisation uniting over 70 European disability NGOs and National Councils of Disabled People to advocate for the human rights and inclusion of disabled citizens in Europe (1996 to 1999), and prior to this she headed the NGO unit within the HELIOS Programme, a European Commission Action Programme promoting equal opportunities for disabled people (1991-1996).

From 2004 to mid-2006, she was mandated by the Swiss Government to lead the Environment and Schools Initiatives Secretariat (ENSI), an international government-based network set up by OECD focussing on innovation, action research and policy development in the field of Education for Sustainable Development.

Whilst in Switzerland, she has also worked as an independent consultant/evaluator, specialising in European social and development policy and health advocacy.

She joined the European Patients’ Forum as its first Executive Director in June 2006, setting up the secretariat in Brussels. Since then, EPF’s membership has grown to more than 50 umbrella organisations of national patients’ platforms and disease specific organisations, representing the collective interests of over 150 million patients with chronic diseases across the European Union in EU healthcare policy and programme development. EPF’s vision is high quality, patient centred equitable healthcare for all EU patients.

List of publications

Please visit www.eu-patient.eu to find a wealth of material on patient empowerment and health literacy.