With “One Health” to a sustainable health system

In Salzburg, experts from the SCIANA health network from Germany, Great Britain and Switzerland met for the programme meeting. Under the motto “Learning from crises”, they discussed ideas for crisis-proof healthcare in the future.

Bosch Health Campus | February 2023
SCIANA network meeting discussion
SCIANA / Christian Streili

At the SCIANA network meeting in Salzburg, fellows discussed new approaches to improving health systems in Germany, the UK and Switzerland.

After the pandemic, fellows of the SCIANA health network met again for the first time face to face at the Salzburg Global Seminar event centre. At SCIANA, the selected health sector experts are presented with the rare opportunity to deal with fundamental questions of healthcare across sectors and countries, far away from their everyday professional lives. To this end, the Robert Bosch Foundation, the Swiss Careum Foundation and the British Health Foundation initiated the network. Since 2022, said network has been funded on the German side by Bosch Health Campus, an institution of the foundation.

Every year, 18 additional leaders from the health sector of the three participating countries are added by means of a selection process. Recently, these were from Germany, for example, the patient representative Birgit Bauer, Dr. Ulrike Streit, COO of the University Hospital Frankfurt and Dr. Alexander Schellinger, Head of the Care Management Development Division at Techniker Krankenkasse, a German statutory health insurance fund. “Our first meeting in Salzburg to me was very refreshing and energizing. My favourite part was connecting with other fellows during the sessions and our time off. Fellows from different backgrounds and countries were sharing ideas, thoughts and our personal experiences”, says Ulrike Streit.

Professionals, health literacy and digitalisation

In Salzburg, the fellows work on “challenges” they have chosen themselves. Over the course of the next two years, they want to work out how to build an interconnected and sustainable health ecosystem based on “One Health” principles. “One Health” is the World Health Organisation’s approach to designing and implementing programmes in which multiple sectors work together to achieve better public health results. In doing so, the SCIANA fellows focus primarily on the topics of professionals, health literacy and digitalisation. “When we talk about the future of the healthcare system in Germany, you can quickly get the impression that we are just overrun by problems. My first SCIANA seminar in Salzburg provided an inspiring counterbalance to this. ‘OneHealth‘ helps us to develop holistic perspectives for which we, as managers develop new networks in Salzburg”, says Alexander Schellinger, Head of Care Management Development at Techniker Krankenkasse.

The participants of the new, fifth year also used the three days in Salzburg to get to know fellows of the fourth year personally and to work with them. On “Overlap Day”, when both years met, senior advisers Fiona Godlee, phyisican and former editor-in-chief of the BMJ journal and Bettina Borisch from the University of Geneva, as well as the co-chair José Martin-Moreno from the University of Valencia, provided impulses on the topic of “Leadership in a post-pandemic world”, i.e. on how leadership roles must change after the pandemic. As part of a thought experiment, the fellows also considered what advice they had if they lived in 2050 and returned to the present. For example, they would to more for a fairer distribution of resources on a global economic level and equal access to education for all.

A “contract” for health and well-being

At their first meeting in May 2022, the fourth year fellows had already decided on the topic “Building a new social contract for health and well-being”. This is about that a new “social contract” for health and well-being might look like, both at regional and national level, whilst comparing the three countries of Germany, Switzerland and the UK. In particular, the question of how citizens could be involved in such a “contract” played a role. During a visit in a health centre in Berlin, the German side had conducted meetings with providers, doctors, nurses and representatives of the municipality in the meantime, which gave important impulses for further group work. In order to obtain evidence-based results, surveys and literature research are also planned.