AAATE, “The Association for the Advancement of Assistive Technology in Europe”- conference was held from 11th to 15th of September in Sheffield, UK. 

This year the conference focused on addressing the global challenge of meeting peoples’ needs and showing them the benefit which may be obtained by using technology in care. The conference (http://www.aaate2017.eu/), aimed at managers, health professionals, researchers, management teams and collaborators of the EIP on AHA (https://ec.europa.eu/eip/ageing/home_en), covered a variety of topics such as dementia, robotics in healthcare, universal design or sport. For four days, insights and projects which are helping to progress towards more sustainable health and healthcare systems which support the implementation, scalability and transferability of integrated care solutions in Europe, were shared.

This meeting was an opportunity for the European project SCIROCCO to present the Scirocco Tool. The purpose of this project is to develop and validate a tool to facilitate the scaling-up and the transfer of good practices in integrated care among European regions and enabling a multidimensional evaluation of the maturity of regions to implement those good practices.

On 12th September the workshop entitled “Integrated care in Europe. What is needed?” took place as part of the “Change management through assisted technology” session. This workshop was used to share the lessons learnt to date regarding Scirocco Tool development and design, besides presenting experience related to the tool implementation in Norrbotten and Basque Country regions. Likewise, its intention was to demonstrate how the tool can be useful to assess success factors and areas of improvement related to managing change in organisations. This is an opportunity to share the tool development, validation and testing stages in different regions with the attendees.

Kronikgune was responsible for presenting the Basque experience at the workshop, regarding tool usage to assess the degree of maturity of the Basque Healthcare System for integrated care implementation purposes. The self-assessment process included the participation of ten experts in integrated care at the region healthcare systems. In addition to reflecting upon the system maturity, this experience has contributed to identifying improvements to be made in Scirocco Tool, which is currently being finely-tuned.

To know more about the project and tool, click here