This year EuroNet Summer Meeting was in the beautiful city of Motovun in the Istrian hills of Croatia. Our wonderful hosts were the Croatian EuroNet team and the Croatian Public Health residents, consultants and colleagues from across the country. Twenty-one EuroNet members attended from 8 member countries. The meeting was coupled with the Croatian National Health Systems and Health Policy Conference, which provided a great opportunity to network and exchange knowledge and ideas.
Developing and building on existing partnerships was a key topic at the Summer Meeting. As EuroNet MRPH grows in size, we know that the partnerships we form and the work we can do with partner organisations becomes more and more important. One of the organisations we have a partnership with is European Public Health Alliance (EPHA), who will be organising a health advocacy workshop for us in Brussels on 28 and 29 September 2017. The workshop has proved hugely popular and is now full! A newly strengthened partnership is with the Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region (ASPHER). ASPHER wants to reform the public health curriculum, by defining competencies a public health professional should have. We spent time discussing how competencies are integrated into the various European curricula. Furthermore, ASPHER had asked for a member of EuroNet to sit on their Executive Board and on their professionalisation committee: a great opportunity to further strengthen the relationship between ASPHER and EuroNet MRPH and work together more closely in future.
Internships are one of the core areas EuroNet works on, acting as a mediator between resident and institution, promoting opportunities for residents and actively searching for internship institutions. Goals this year are to institute internship tutors, to do a follow up study of the past three years, to evaluate the past six months, to plan the next year and to get more national and international placements, so the working group have a busy agenda ahead!
The EuroNet Platform launched during the Spring Meeting in Strasbourg is now LIVE and ready to go! The Platform is a unique new digital platform that gives residents the opportunity to collaborate on public health research projects. Visit the platform at www.euronetplatform.com.
The meeting was an opportunity to hear from colleagues from around Croatia about the work they are doing and learn from them. We were really lucky to receive a talk from the Cochrane Collaboration Team and we also heard from Professor Stjepan Oreskovic on the issue of leadership, something that as a group we know is important area for us to develop during residency to be able to effectively lead and manage change within our organisations.
Planning ahead: at the European Public Health conference in Stockholm this November we are co-organising a workshop with EuphaNXT and Young Forum Gastein about presenting a scientific work to a non-scientific audience. There will be two speakers; a journalist and a public health professional with experience in communicating with a variety of audiences and working internationally in public health.
As you know, EuroNet has always been a place to make both work links and long lasting friendships, and the meeting provided plenty of opportunity to get to know each other better over delicious food and drink.
See you in Lisbon!
