16 Oct Welcome to the newly launched SELFIE website

The SELFIE project began on September 1st, 2015, as did my new job at the Institute of Health Policy & Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam. I will be working on SELFIE for the next four years, the duration of the project and so far, so good…

We began the project with a productive two-day kick-off meeting at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Participants from the seven partner organizations in the UK, Norway, Spain, Croatia, Hungary, Austria, and Germany came to the meeting.

During the kick-off meeting we discussed the project structure and planning in general, the content of the nine work packages, and several practical project management topics. A walking tour through [rainy] Rotterdam and an adventurous ride on the water-taxi gave us all a chance to get to know one-another better!

After the kick-off meeting we created a communication and dissemination plan for the upcoming years. We are proud to now have the website, a central part of our communication strategy, up and running. With many thanks to Dutch Giraffe!

Currently, the Austrian, German, and Dutch partners are working hard to develop a conceptual framework on integrated chronic care (ICC) for multi-morbidity (WP1), primarily through a review of scientific papers and grey literature. We are searching in different online databases for articles concerning: frameworks/models, integrated care, and multi-morbidity. Because each of these words have many synonyms and different formulations used in different countries and context, the search thus far has yielded many results (7,500 scientific articles). The reviewing process is currently underway!

Parallel to this process each partner is identifying existing ICC for multi-morbidity projects in their country, as well as in several other countries (e.g., Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel). If you are currently working on or know of such projects, please get in touch with us, as we are trying to learn as much as possible about ongoing initiatives!

Within the next few months we will be collecting information on these projects. The most promising projects will be included in the next phases of SELFIE. Namely, we will gather in-depth information on these via ‘thick descriptions’ (WP2) and eventually empirically evaluate these projects (WP4 & WP5). Furthermore, the UK will soon take the lead in starting to describe and analyze financial/payment schemes that support ICC for multi-morbidity (WP3).

I am really looking forward to working in such an international and multidisciplinary team on this innovative and societally relevant project.

Participants from different partner organizations will be posting updates on our work via this blog regularly, you can either check this page to stay up to date, or sign up for the newsletter below to receive information via email. Please contact us if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions!