Wellbeing Economy in Brussels – March 4, 2025

Wellbeing Economy in Brussels – March 4, 2025

NWA participated in the launch event for the new report for the wellbeing economy in Brussels March 4, 2025. In an event  organised by the Green European Foundation and the Institute for European Environmental Policy, the wider community of policy stakeholders presented recent data, analysis, and projections about environmental policies linked to wellbeing.

The event especially launched a political brief as a result of a one-year-long exchange within a knowledge community of more than 60 experts that maps the main challenges and provide recommendations to inspire European institutions in the delivery of their ambition to work towards the well-being of their people.

The report can be found  here – and is a way for the knowledge community project for a wellbeing economy in the EU aims to address this challenge by developing ideas and political proposals to put the EU’s ambition to “work towards an integrated framework for wellbeing” into practice.

 

OECD High-Level Social Policy Forum

The 2025 OECD Social Policy Ministerial meeting was held on 14 February 2025 at the OECD Conference Centre in Paris, France, and focused on the theme New Frontiers for Social Policy: Investing in the FutureThe meeting provided a platform to for Ministers to come together and exchange ideas, ambitions, and approaches on the new frontiers for social policy, with a view to investing in the future.

NWA was selected to participate in the meeting that gave great segway for both investment strategies and thinking, but also connected ideas from social policies into health policies – and a lot of issues connected to equity and future wellbeing. Read more here.

Tour de Health

The Future of Trust? NWA participated in the Tour de Health 2024 organised by Healthcare Denmark to present its work on establishing a KPI model to assess quality and progress in multistakeholder partnerships, especially for mission-driven ones.

The Tour de Health 2024 gathered health care and life science stakeholders from 13 diplomatic missions in Copenhagen to learn from Danish experiences and share their own in trying to work with complex issues in the some times challenging world multistakeholder platforms. The event was a great opportunity to also dive deep into the issue of trust and transformation with both Danish Life Science Cluster community partners (Nordic Healthcare Group, Novo Nordisk, and Lundbeck) and also global partners (Global Health Literacy Academy), trans-Atlantic (Engage Nova Scotia), European (EUREGHA), and Danish (Prescient).

It also gave a good opportunity for further dialogue about the nature of collaboration – gathering also feedback from Canadian Ambassador Carolyn Bennet, Head of Impact at Novo Nordisk Foundation Thomas Alslev Christensen, Professor at the University of Copenhagen Maria Kristiansen, Country Director Denmark Johnson & Johnson Julie Brooker, and Deputy CEO Rigshospitalet Martin Magelund Rasmussen. Find all of the videos here.

New Erasmus+ project on the way

Mental health – stress management for first responders through augmented reality in disasters

As a new experience, we’ll be part of a French-led consortium to explore better pathways towards mental health in a very challenging workplace – disaster, accidents, and crisis. With 8 other partners from France, Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Italy, and Spain, we’ll be able from 2024-2026 to not just explore and develop better practices, but also integrate new technology for relief, awareness, management, and possibly rehabilitation in the MentaStress project.

Our project will look nothing like the image of minions – but like them, we humans are simply trying to do our best in challenging circumstances.  We’ll be back with more asap.

Trust and Transformation

Representing the Nordic Health 2030 Movement and the Danish Committee for Health Education, Lars Münter participated in the High-Level WHO/Europe Conference for the Tallinn Charter 15th Anniversary Health Systems Conference: Trust and transformation – resilient and sustainable health systems for the future.

As part of the debate panel for Public Health Leadership, Lars Münter highlighted the powerful role that health leaders have as changemakers for healthy transformation beyond the health care system.

Read more about the conference.

Erasmus – sharing experiences

In 2023 we began considering how different uses of the Erasmus+ framework might be a method to share Danish experiences across borders and facilitating knowledge sharing between sectors and silos.

The Erasmus+ programme enables thousands of projects for professional knowledge sharing, but also enable interpersonal upskilling. Read more about the almost endless possibilities, results, and tools here.

We will be trying to explore new ideas, given our previous experience from projects like:
Dem@Mentoring (supporting informal carers for people with dementia)
ECARIS (supporting informal carers for kidney patients)
RECADE (building a guide for rehabilitiation)
Art4Me (exploring uses of art and creativity for mental health)
INFOCARE (exploring digital support for people with dementia)
Well@SME (building a digital platform to support mental health at SME workplaces)
eHealth4Cancer (exploring digital tools for cancer support)

Communities and people

In 2019, a strong consortium of Nordic health stakeholders created a joint vision paper – the Nordic Health 2030 report – a result, that clearly shows a need for a different balance and focus in health and healthcare to prioritise the role and value of citizen involvement, engagement, and action to deliver systemic health and wellbeing in a future-fit and sustainable society.

In 2020-2022 the European Health Futures Forum executed an extensive Three Horizons analysis on the future of European health and the role of both the healthcare sector and skills in future health professionals. The study clearly showed the importance of nurturing local social activity and connectivity to enable a wider system change towards wellbeing.

These two processess and reports was a basis for building the Nordic Wellbeing Academy (NWA) and to practically explored how to best deliver hands-on mindsets, changes, and hope for people across the Nordics and beyond. And how to better leverage existing and new concepts and ideas into practical social or physical actions that can transform lives.