Dear colleague,

OBSERVATORY VENICE SUMMER SCHOOL 2020

“The hospital of the future: where patients get appropriate, humane and high quality care, and where health professionals want to work”

Venice (IT), 26-31 July 2020

We are glad to announce you that applications to the 14^th edition of the Observatory Venice Summer School are NOW OPEN!

APPLY NOW at www.theobservatorysummerschool.org ; PLACES ARE LIMITED therefore early applications are strongly encouraged.

Please find attached the application form to be submitted together with your CV and a picture to info@theobservatorysummerschoo.org

Thanks for passing this announcement on to others who might be interested or want to get involved.

We apologize for any cross posting which may occur.

We look forward to welcoming you in Venice!

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The Observatory Venice Summer School is a short, intensive course. It is a week of learning, interacting, studying, debating, and sharing experiences with other policy makers, planners and professionals to understand, discuss and improve hospital care strategies and policies.

The course is aimed at senior and mid-level policy makers, civil servants and professionals with responsibility for hospital care, whether at policy, self-regulatory, clinical or managerial level. If you want to make hospitals a place that people look up to, both for high quality patient care and as a place to work, then the Observatory Venice Summer School is for you.

Objectives: To

ü  Question everything we know about what hospitals do, how they work and how they are regulated and paid

ü  Reflect on how the patients we treat in hospitals are changing, asking how we will care for increasing numbers of frail older patients, patients with multiple complex conditions who don’t easily fit into a single specialty, patients with highly specialist needs whose care is at the forefront of scientific research, patients from increasingly diverse cultures …

ü  Explore how we will adapt to the challenges of disruptive technology, in a world of minimally invasive surgery, new types of imaging, and bedside diagnostics

ü  Think about how, in a world where the brightest and best have many other opportunities, we will attract and retain high quality staff, and why it matters

ü  Challenge traditional ways of doing things, asking whether things are best done by a different type of health worker, a patient or their carer, or a machine

So what’s wrong with the hospitals we have? What needs to be changed? How do we do it?

Hospitals play an important part in all our lives. Most of us are born in a hospital and many will die in one. Hopefully, we will spend as little as possible of the intervening one, at least as a patient, but some people, with complex chronic conditions, may come to see the hospital as almost a second home. If we are health professionals or managers our involvement with hospitals will be much closer, spending our working lives in them, often at times when most people are at home in bed.

The things that we do in hospitals have changed beyond recognition even in a few decades. Thirty years ago, a patient with a heart attack would have an ECG and some blood tests and put in a bed to rest for a week or more, connected to a heart monitor to detect when things go wrong. Now, they will be whisked to an operating theatre to have the obstruction in their artery removed and go back to work, sometimes within hours. Yet our success in keeping people alive brings challenges. People who once would have died survive into old age, but with multiple conditions and afflicted by growing frailty and loss of function. Patients with cancer who would once have been “treated” with toxic drugs derived from chemical weapons are now given chemo- or immunotherapy targeted precisely to the cells that have malfunctioned.

Elsewhere, we have seen changes that challenge the rationale for having a hospital at all. Advances in chemistry, physics, and biology gave us laboratories, x-ray departments, and clean safe operating theatres. Now we have new ways of seeing, and operating, inside bodies.

Despite all these changes, the way that we organize the hospital, for example around departments of medicine or surgery, has barely changed in 200 years. Nor has the way that we work together, in professional hierarchies, changed much.

But change we must, because the current model simply isn’t working. It isn’t meeting the needs of patients and, although health professionals find ways to adopt new technology and models of care (such as networking across hospitals), they often do so despite the design and operation of the hospital. One consequence is that we are struggling to attract and retain the health professionals we need. Unless we act soon, there will be no-one to care for us.

This Summer School is based on a new study by the European Observatory in which we asked those who should know best, the front line health professionals, to tell us how the work they do is changing and what this means for the way we run our hospitals. It builds on a series of earlier studies that we have conducted, working with architects, engineers, operational researchers, management researchers and others to reimagine the hospital. It is taught by people who know about hospitals, from first hand experience, but who have taken time to step back to ask the difficult questions about why we do what we do, and could we do it better – and how would regulation, planning and payment need to enable such improvements?

If you have also asked those questions, please join us in Venice in 2020.

Approach: The six day course includes formal teaching but has at its core the experiences of participants in practice. A highly participative approach emphasizes group work that cuts across themes, participant presentations, round tables and panel discussions. It draws upon the latest thinking in the different areas it covers and uses case studies to examine how this can be applied in practice. Course participants will also be able to share perspectives with and gain insights from key international organizations including the European Commission, OECD and WHO as well as relevant professional and governmental organizations and to engage in political dialogue with senior policy makers. They will be part of the Summer School tradition, which fosters evidence-based policy-making and encourages European health policy debate by raising key issues, sharing learning and building lasting networks.

MODULE A: Who will be in the hospitals of the future?

This module places the patient, with his or her particular needs, at the centre of our thinking, asking questions such as:

• Who will be coming into the hospital of the future?
• How can we meet the needs of the growing numbers of frail elderly patients with complex conditions affecting multiple organ systems?
• How will we provide highly specialised care, demanding detailed knowledge of the molecules we are targetting, in an accessible and equitable way?

Life threatening emergencies require highly skilled teams to be ready when needed, but how can we make this happen?

MODULE B: Getting the best from health professionals

This module looks at the health professionals who make the hospital work, providing a safe and caring environment. Questions we will ask include:

• How can we attract and retain scarce health professionals and what can we learn from concepts like Magnet Hospitals? Who should do what?
• Do we make the best use of our staff, shifting tasks between different types of health worker, between health workers and patients and their carers, and between both of these groups and machines?
• How can we make hospitals places people want to work, free from bullying and burnout?
• Does IT help or hinder our health professionals?
• What can we learn from the experiences of those who have implemented new models of care?

What are the implications for training current and future health professionals?

MODULE C: Seizing opportunities in the midst of disruption

This module asks how we deal with disruption, both technological and organizational. Introducing a radical new way of doing things can have consequences throughout the organization. Traditional roles and hierarchies may have to adapt:

ü  How do we see over the horizon, to anticipate what is coming towards us?

ü  When is something new disruptive, and when is it more of the same? And how do we maximise the opportunities and minimise the problems?

ü  How do we create an organisation that welcomes change and not one that resists it?

What should policy makers and regulators do (or not do) to enable such change?

MODULE D: Working together for better health care

This module asks how health services work together to provide high quality care. Patient flows may need to change. New teams may have to form and old ones dissolve. This module will look at practical examples that have been implemented in different parts of Europe, asking what works and what doesn’t work:

ü  Place-based networks, providing acute care (e.g. stroke or trauma networks)

ü  Dispersed networks (e.g. rare diseases, European Reference networks)

Networks spanning multiple levels of care (e.g. cancer networks)

MODULE E: Where next?

This module discusses the overall implications of the changes in patients, health workers, and technology and models of care and its implications at policy, planning, payment and organizational level:

• What will the hospital of the future look like, if it exists at all?
• How can we anticipate change and harness the benefits while avoiding the pitfalls? How should we pay hospitals to do what we expect them to do (and avoid what we do not want)?

How can we make the hospital somewhere that patients do not fear and where health professionals want to work? How should health policy change to enable such development?

Faculty:  Director, Professor Reinhard Busse (TU Berlin), Co-Director Martin McKee (LSHTM). The Summer School will also involve a group of expert lecturers and facilitators from international organizations and centres of expertise.

Accreditation: the Summer School has applied to the European Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education and it is expected that participation will count towards ongoing professional development in all EU Member States.

Organization: the Summer School is organized by the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, the Veneto Region of Italy, the European Commission and World Health Organization (WHO).

Additional information available at www.theobservatorysummerschool.org

The Observatory Venice Summer School Team

Annalisa Marianecci on behalf of

OBSERVATORY VENICE SUMMER SCHOOL 2020

“The hospital of the future: where patients get appropriate, humane and high quality care, and where health professionals want to work”, Venice, 26-31 July 2020

APPLY NOW!!!  www.theobservatorysummerschool.org

info@theobservatorysummerschool.org

follow us on Twitter: @OBSsummerschool