I am so excited it’s almost a little ridiculous. I’ve been invited to join session 553 at the Salzburg Global Seminar! The session is called Toward a Shared Culture of Health:Enriching and Charting the Patient-Clinician Relationship, and some of the most prominent researchers and activists in my field will be there. If you are not familiar with the Salzburg Global Seminar, you can read more about them online, but here’s their mission: 

The mission of Salzburg Global Seminar is to challenge current and future leaders to solve issues of global concern.

To do this we design, facilitate and host international strategic convening and multi-year programs to tackle systems challenges critical for the next generation.

Originally founded in 1947 to encourage the revival of intellectual dialogue in post-war Europe, we are a game-changing catalyst for global engagement on critical issues in education, health, environment, economics, governance, peace-building and more.

We work with carefully chosen partners to drive social change in the areas of imagination, sustainability, and justice.

Salzburg Global connects the most talented people and the most innovative ideas, challenging governments, institutions and individuals at all stages of development and all sectors to rethink their relationships and identify shared interests and goals. (http://www.salzburgglobal.org/who-we-are/our-mission.html)

The session I will be attending begins already on Friday, and will last for five whole days. The schedule is intense, and I’m so looking forward to every minute of it. Key questions that will be adressed during the session are:

• If fully transparent communication becomes a foundation for the future patient-clinician relationship, how will medical practice evolve?
• Can open medical records become central vehicles for engaging individuals actively in maintaining and restoring health, and in managing illness?
• How may such change in practice enhance equity and transform care, particularly for those at the lower end of the socio-economic gradient, among ageing populations and those with chronic or serious advancing illness?
• How can patients and families contribute to their care in ways that help clinicians to manage larger populations of patients effectively
• How might patient safety and the processes, outcomes and costs of care improve?
• How may fully transparent communication help informal caregivers whose family members and loved ones are increasingly dependent on their care?
• How might transparency and co-creation of medical records help people become better stewards of their own health outside the clinical setting?
• How might greater transparency promote community engagement in designing systems to deliver care both needed and wanted?

Spot on, right? These are exactly the type of questions we are addressing in the DOME consortium, in my new research project PACESS, and precisely what I have been pondering as I’ve navigated healthcare myself as both a patient and a family member over the last years. I’m looking forward to engaging and inspiring discussions, to shared experiences of doing similar research and development work from all over the world, to new tools and arguments that I can bring with me back home, and hopefully to fruitful future collaborations!

So, starting Friday, expect reflections both here on the blog, on twitter and perhaps some pictures on Instagram. The fact that the seminar resides at Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg is of course just a bonus – but one I will thoroughly enjoy.

[post 6 in the #blogg100 challenge]