Professors Williams, Radnor and Gruber presenting at the event

The Centre for Service Management (CSM) was delighted to host two events on a crucial topic: Europe is facing major challenges in health and social care. For example, there are a growing proportion of elderly people who need specialist care as well as primary care and chronic lifestyle related diseases and mental illnesses among the young and able-bodied are rising too. These and other challenges drive costs throughout Europe and ask for service innovations.

As these problems are complex and interconnected, they can only be solved by multidisciplinary and international teams of researchers. CSM therefore decided to invited health and social care experts from 8 European countries (Belgium, Finland, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and the UK) to take part in two events to explore synergies and potential collaboration projects in the area of service innovation in health and social care.

‌‌The first event on September 10^th was a networking event that brought together our European guests and colleagues from CSM, Loughborough University’s Design School and Department of Computer Science. Ms Priti Meredith, Research Development Manager in the School of Business and Economics started the event by giving an overview of potential Horizon 2020 funding opportunities. Attendees then worked in small groups discussing three important themes that were identified: 1) Interactions within healthcare networks, 2) technology in healthcare service systems - The Bright and the Dark Side, and 3) service design and re-design. These three themes will result in three articles to be published in a special sub-section on health and social care in the prestigious Journal of Service Management in 2016. Further, it is planned that the three groups will develop joint funding applications in the future as well.

‌The second event on September 11^th was the 1^st European Health and Social Care Service Innovation Symposium. This event was open to a wider audience and consisted of individual presentations by our European guest speakers and a roundtable discussion involving the audience. Professor David Williams, Loughborough University’s Academic Research Challenge Lead for Health and Wellbeing and Professor Stewart Robinson, Acting Dean of the School of Business and Economics gave welcome addresses. In addition, Dr Laurence Gardiner, Research Challenges Development Manager (Health and Wellbeing) gave an overview of social challenges and an introduction to the Horizon 2020 Work Programme. The event was well attended with several lively and thought-provoking discussions.