On March 6, 2024, the final conference of our Horizon Europe IDEAHL “EU Digital Health Literacy Strategy” project took place at the European Parliament in Brussels. At the conference, the outcomes of the project were discussed, emphasising the impact of digital education on the promotion of healthier and more active lifestyles among citizens across Europe.
Within the IDEAHL project, our team from Consulta Europa is the leader of Work Package 2 (WP2) on co-creation of solutions for the improvement of the digital health literacy (dHL) levels of EU citizens. Particularly, Consulta Europa led the development and implementation of a sound co-creation methodology for the organisation of project co-creation exercises across the 10 project countries. Over 1,400 citizens and professionals were engaged in IDEAHL co-creation across 19 different target groups and through the organisation of an overall 140 co-creation sessions.
Co-creation entailed a wide range of stakeholders, from policymakers to healthcare professionals and students, informal caregivers, social agents, and a variety of citizen groups, including, among others, young women, senior people, children, migrants, and prisoners.
The co-creation experience was target- and result-oriented to feed the development of the main expected outcome of the IDEAHL project, the EU dHL Strategy. This strategy offers detailed directions for enhancing digital health literacy for the entire population. It emphasises health promotion, disease prevention, treatment, self-management, and monitoring of the effects on quality of life, well-being, productivity, and the economy. It also addresses geographical, social, and economic factors that contribute to inequalities in digital health literacy.
The strategy is the result of a synergy between different organisations and experts who share a single goal: to provide individuals with the tools they need to access, understand, and effectively use health information from digital sources. The strategy focuses on several key areas, such as training and skills development, content and curriculum creation, evaluation and monitoring, policy and strategy development, access to and understanding of information, critical evaluation, and application. These elements form the foundation of digital health literacy and are essential to enabling individuals to become informed and aware users of digital health resources.
Within the Final Conference of the IDEAHL project, Consulta Europa had its own space, where our Managing Director Beatrice Avagnina coordinated an interesting panel on ‘WP2 Co-Creation Activities for the EU Strategy’. Moreover, our ethics expert, Dr. Carina Dantas, participated in another panel of the event, presenting the work implemented under Work Package 4, focusing on ethics, privacy, and social inclusion for dHL.
The conference was an engaging and stimulating occasion with outstanding speakers, a way to share the important results the project managed to achieve, and a way to network with like-minded individuals sharing ideas and exploring possibilities for collaboration and future exploitation of the outcomes.