The Maltese Presidency proposes to organise a High-Level Conference on eHealth in keeping with the practice established by first-semester Presidencies since 2007. The main objective will be to bring together high-level policymakers from all EU MS and other key stakeholders to discuss the most important current issues of common interest regarding the effective, safe and economic application of ICT to the planning, delivery and evaluation of health services. High-level delegates will be invited from all EU MS, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland & USA. The Presidency will co-locate the event with a Health IT conference & exhibition organised by HIMSS Europe. Partnering with HIMSS will help reach a wider and more diverse audience, including key stakeholders from the health IT industry, allowing EU eHealth policies and the outcome of relevant EU-funded research and innovation to reach a wider audience. The co-located events will be known collectively as “eHealth Week 2017” (EHW17). The EHW17 programme will be both diverse and comprehensive, highlighting developments taking place in various aspects of eHealth such as legal, organisational, semantic and technical. The overarching theme of EHW17 is “Data for Health: the key to personalised sustainable care”. Subjects discussed will include: - Patient access to and sharing of health data - Moving health data safely onto cloud infrastructure - Sharing personal health data across country borders - Improving effectiveness, safety and privacy of mHealth - Scaling up digital innovation for health and care - International cooperation in eHealth - Smart environments & integrated care - Data management and analytics for personalised medicine & public health policy EHW17 will include an Informal Working Lunch for high-level delegates, during which they will be invited to discuss the health-related aspects of the mid-term review of the Digital Single Market. Both Presidency and Commission will have a stand on the exhibition floor.

Tobacco use is the major preventable health risk factor responsible for over 500 deaths per year in Malta and a large amount of ill health from long term diseases such as cancer, heart and lung diseases. This project deals with the training of health professionals involved in the provision of smoking cessation services within the Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Directorate of the Ministry responsible for Health. The training will be undertaken at the Department of Health Promotion and Improvement of the Health Service Executive in Dublin, Ireland. Through this project, the participants will undergo a five day training visit to Dublin to gain new skills and competencies with regards to smoking cessation services for the whole population with a special focus on young people, women and pregnant women. The project will contribute to re-engineering the tobacco cessation service to improve population measures to reduce uptake of tobacco by children and young people. It will also contribute to improving quit rates in smokers and will introduce a systematic evaluation process into the tobacco cessation service. The project will ensure that the new national Tobacco Action Plan (2017-2020) will contain the most effective and scientifically sound measures available.

Background - Covid-19 abruptly transitioned online learning from a convenient learning option to a necessity. Higher education had no choice but to promote digital education opportunities in order to save students’ academic year and moderate institutional costs. Educators who lacked digital education knowledge and skill, were left in a stressful situation needing to transition from face-to-face to online learning overnight. Sometimes out of desperation, online learning was not delivered as effective digital education, but as emergency remote learning.NEED - Today educators must constantly learn to keep abreast of the most effective teaching and learning strategies and healthcare practices. Continuing education (CE) has not always considered the new realities of ever-busier academic and healthcare staff who have less time available for CE, and sometimes are subject to constraints preventing them from attending face-to-face CE experiences. There is overwhelming pressure for administrators to offer intentional educational supports and staff training to ensure staff can offer quality online educational experiences.Solution - TOVID will address an unmet need –relevant, practical, CE accessible in mediums other than face-to-face. This is especially essential for busy academics and short staffed hospitals and long-term care workers where leaving the workplace can jeopardize patient safety and care. TOVID will provide solutions by designing, delivering and evaluating innovative, long-lasting, high quality digital content and programs to facilitate educator’s digital education readiness and capacity conveniently accessible via mobile devices. Educators will attain the confidence, knowledge and skills to support them to implement blended and online teaching. By networking and sharing expertise and resources with other countries, universities, government, the public and private healthcare industries and an international NGO, we will be able to expedite the design, uptake and scalability of digital educational products in countries less enabled with regard to digital education in order to prepare students to be succeed in a digital world (an aim consistent with the European Commission Digital Education Action Plan https://ec.europa.eu/education/education-in-the-eu/digital-education-action-plan_en. Delivering CE via video has had positive results for both engaging learners and learner knowledge retention and acknowledges that (a) educators are busier than they ever have been; and (b) educators enjoy learning with and from peers. Target Group - Approximately 4000 university academic staff in (Malta, Cyprus, Finland and Slovenia); Malta's Ministry of Health 500 Postgraduate Medical Training Centre professionals and Mater Dei Hospital’s 1000 clinicians, residents and students; 500 staff at Learning Work’s 9 long-term care homes; and 5000 European Federation of Educators for Nursing Science (Fine) NGO members who will collaborate to create, share and distribute innovative resources to support educators and reduce redundancy, time and cost.Outputs include: (1) A Get Ready digital education program to increase readiness by convincing educators of the merits of eLearning and motivating them to continue to review Get Started. (2) The Get Started digital video program to provide educators with the confidence, knowledge and skills to take first steps toward designing, delivering and evaluating effective online, distance and blended learning and be motivated to enroll in additional digital education learning experiences. (3) The Get Online Teaching Tips digital program will take advantage of strategic partnerships to support exchange of ideas and tips and provide a learning community for educator peer-to-peer support to continue to learn best practices regarding online teaching with and from one another. All three digital education programs will delivered via email/twitter and accessible on mobile devices. (4) A website and online repository to further distribute digital education programs and enable rating and cataloging. (5) Evaluating the resources will enable understanding with regard to the value of video and mobile learning in digital education, how and under what circumstances busy academics and short staffed healthcare worker transfer learning to teaching, and how geography, cultural, gender, and language - impact digital education. A mixed method design will be used to obtain a full understanding of the interventions.TOVID will deliver an arena of quality resources beneficial at a regional, national and international level that uniquely spans healthcare and education free for public access from the TOVID’s open access repository. The new ideas and strategies implemented will go a long way toward addressing education shortcomings highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic and move TOVID partners and the EU toward becoming leaders in innovative digital teaching strategies and solutions (Annex for TOVID at a Glance).

Oral diseases and conditions are the 3rd most expensive diseases to treat in the EU. They affect about half of the EU population. As highlighted in the 2021 WHO Oral Health Resolution, there are major challenges in the financing of oral health care: in deviation from the UN and WHO goal of Universal Health Coverage, many EU citizens do not have access to essential oral health care without financial hardship. This causes detrimental impacts for the individual citizen, while increasing costs and wasting resources on the macro level. Research-policy gaps and research-practice gaps keep triggering inertia and inaction instead of addressing the persistent, albeit largely preventable, burden of oral diseases. To this end, the PRUDENT (Prioritization, incentives and Resource use for sUstainable DENTistry) project aims to develop and implement an innovative and context-adaptive framework for optimized financing of oral care. PRUDENT brings together top investigators from prestigious universities, public authorities and policymakers, civil society and patient organizations, health insurers, and health professionals, to achieve a step change in collective problem solving. Given the comprehensiveness of the topic, PRUDENT uses a targeted approach that is entirely focused on four major root-causes underlying the current limitations of oral care financing. Using a mixed-methods research approach, PRUDENT will: (i) co-develop oral health system performance indicators and implement them in EU-wide monitoring framework; (ii) conduct real-world and lab experiments to identify improved oral care financing mechanisms; (iii) leverage regulatory learning, needs-adaptive resource planning and deliberative priority setting to enhance the improvement of oral care financing. The knowledge gained will be merged into the PRUDENT Financing Companion with policy briefs and decision aid tools for concretely actionable and context-adaptive improvement of oral care financing.

Oral diseases and conditions affect more than 3.5 billion people worldwide. They are the 3rd most expensive diseases to treat in the EU and disproportionally affect vulnerable groups. In deviation from the UN and WHO goal of Universal Health Coverage, many EU citizens do not have access to quality oral care without financial hardship. To this end, the DELIVER (DELiberative ImproVEment of oRal care quality) project aims to enhance the quality of oral care through deliberative dialogue and action involving citizens, patients, providers, payers and policymakers. DELIVER will create a synergistic problem-solving ecosystem to convert deliberative dialogues into meaningful improvement of oral care quality. DELIVER brings together top investigators from prestigious universities, civil society and patient organizations, health professionals, policymakers, and SME/industry to achieve a step change in collective problem solving. Given the comprehensiveness of the topic, DELIVER uses a targeted approach that is entirely focused on five major root-causes underlying the current limitations of oral care systems. Using a mixed-methods research approach, DELIVER will co-develop and co-produce new quality improvement approaches in three phases. The 1st phase involves situational analysis, consenting of core quality indicators, and development of a EU-wide monitoring framework. The 2nd phase involves in-depth analysis of select quality improvement approaches: (i) PROMs/PREMs-based quality improvement in dental practices; (ii) community-based quality improvement for vulnerable groups; (iii) quality-oriented commissioning of oral health services. The regulatory determinants of oral care quality improvement will be scrutinized. In the 3rd and final phase, the knowledge gained in the 1st and 2nd phases will be merged into the DELIVER Quality Toolkit with manuals and digital tools for concretely actionable and context-adaptive approaches for oral care quality improvement.