Interview with Dr. Teresa Chavarría Giménez, Coordinator of JA-CHRODIS
Dr. Teresa Chavarría Giménez is the Coordinator of the Joint Action on Chronic Diseases and Promoting Healthy Ageing across the Life cycle
Could you please introduce the Joint Action on Chronic Diseases & Promoting Healthy Ageing across the Life Cycle?
The recent WHO European Health Report 2015 showed that although we are on track to reduce premature mortality due to chronic or non-communicable diseases, they remain amongst the highest killers in Europe. This is largely due to (avoidable) risk factors such as unhealthy diet, tobacco use and harmful alcohol consumption and physical inactivity. The main goal of the Joint Action on Chronic Diseases & Promoting Healthy Ageing across the Life Cycle (JA-CHRODIS) is the exchange and promotion of good practices in these areas.
Starting in January 2014 and running for three years, JA-CHRODIS is paving the way for better health policies across Europe to improve the well-being of citizens. JA-CHRODIS is the largest Joint Action co-funded to date through the Health Programme of the European Commission and Member States with a budget of 9.2 million Euros and over 60 partners representing Member States, research institutes and civil society.
As the field of chronic diseases is very broad, we narrowed the scope of JA-CHRODIS to three main areas of work to be able to produce meaningful and tangible results. These areas are: health promotion and primary prevention, the management and treatment of multimorbidity, as well as of type 2 diabetes, to serve as a case study for other chronic diseases. Each area identifies and evaluates good practices in their respective fields, following a strict scrutiny procedure. All good practices will be made available on the online ‘Platform for Knowledge Exchange’ (PKE). The PKE will integrate a number of items such as:
- On line tools to allow the assessment of practices using criteria agreed upon by EU experts from numerous fields and organizations (including the EIP-AHA);
- A clearinghouse which will be the repository of all good practices selected under the criteria;
- A digital library collating relevant and updated material on chronic diseases;
- An online helpdesk and toolkit to help users develop, implement and evaluate practices.
With the objective to build synergies, the JA-CHRODIS has identified converging elements between our PKE and the EIP-AHA’s repository and will work on their implementation. Thus, the PKE does not only offer the exchange of practices and interventions evaluated under experts’ consensus criteria, but a virtual space to share, learn from others, bridge health system silos and network.
To get a quick overview about the situation of chronic diseases in Europe and what JA-CHRODIS is doing to address it, you can watch our new JA-CHRODI
Source: European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing