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Light at the end of the tunnel

In the photo above, we are having a meeting with the whole group, including Daan who started working in Brussels in April but still manages to attend all meetings via skype.

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Team Dynamics

A few weeks ago, just following the midterm, we all met with our team mentors for the elusive “Team Dynamics” meeting. If your team dynamics meetings were anything like ours, you were probably confused to arrive at a room that had bowls filled with marshmallows on top of the tables. We thought it was just an interesting snack choice on the part of our mentors, but it turns out that we got to use them to make an amazingly beautiful castle, complete with a guard, a prince and a princess. We tragically don’t have any photos of our skewer, toothpick, and marshmallow creation, but you can imagine that it looked pretty much exactly like this: 

Besides our marshmallow masterpiece, we put our amazing teamwork to the test by trying to guess how the others describe us, creating a story out of random images and via improv, and finally discussing what was going well in the team and what we thought we could improve upon.

Overall, the meeting was a fun reminder that we already work really well together as a team. It was an opportunity also to highlight our strengths, as well as focus again on elements that we know we can work better on. Combined with the beautiful weather that day, it was a nice boost before diving into the second half of our project. Cheers to the last two months of the team experience! 

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Halfway there: Mid-term Presentations

On Wednesday the 20th of March we had our mid-term presentation. Cap and Mara gave a short presentation on our own project and we received valuable feedback and many interesting questions! Thank you all for this!

Then, on Thursday the 28th we organized a meeting specifically with our clients MUMC+ and ITEM. In the beginning, we already realized this project was rather extensive and wanted to ensure that we were on the right track, therefore we organized a client meeting halfway in this project. We gave a presentation about our strategy, structure and research thus far which was mainly highlighted by the PESTLE framework. After this framework, we gave our suggestions on key themes which we wanted to focus on. After a long and very intensive (but productive!) meeting, we finished our evening 2,5 hours later with very valuable feedback. Wim van Gemert (MUMC) and Lavinia (ITEM) were very satisfied with our hard work and results and we had constant conversations about our interesting project! This only fueled us to continue to make great strides and power on for the last two months!

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Shaping our project

After diving into the background knowledge about cross-border health care and the health care systems in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands by using the PESTLE framework, we held an afternoon brainstorming session at EDLAB to reframe our findings into more workable packages.

At EDLAB we grouped all our ideas for potential obstacles and opportunities for establishing a cross-border pediatric surgical center in the Meuse-Rhine Euregion together into 4 main themes. The main themes that flowed out of this meeting are:

Building a legal framework

Building a financial framework

Marketing & communication of the future Euregional pediatric surgical center and the project in general

Accessibility of care, patient data and treatment information.

The grouping of all our current research together into the 4 themes resulted in the MindMap shown under this paragraph and will form the basis of our final research outcome.

We eventually ended our productive afternoon by treating ourselves to some Asian flavors and a cozy chat at a nearby restaurant.

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In the video linked to this post (click on the title) our client Wim van Gemert, Professor in Paediatric Surgery, summarizes our PREMIUM project (in Dutch). He explains the reasons for and purpose of setting up an Euregional Paediatric Surgery Centre; a collaboration between the paediatric surgery departments of Uniklinik RWTH Aachen, Centre Hospitalier de Liège and Maastricht UMC+.

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PESTLE Analysis

In the first stages of our project, we will work with the PESTLE analysis which is a framework used to analyze the following perspectives: political, economic, socio-cultural, technological, legal, and environmental. Across all perspectives, we will also consider the sustainable aspect.

POLITICAL

These determine the extent to which government and government policy may impact on an organization or a specific industry. In general, this would include political policy and stability as well as trade, fiscal and taxation policies. In our project, we considered the healthcare policies of pediatric patients amongst others. There are differences in the policies of treatment and obviously, there will be policies on who will pay for treatment.

ECONOMIC

Economic factors relate to economic policies, economic structures and to what degree the economy impacts the organization. One of the main themes in this project is to come up with a financial model. However, we first intend to analyze the situation and therefore we are comparing the different healthcare systems in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. Further, we are looking into different funds from the European Union for instance which may be available for this cross-border project.

SOCIAL/CULTURAL

Social/cultural factors relate to the cultural aspects, attitudes, beliefs, and systemic issues and structures that influence the context an organization does work within and how it is perceived. Considering the project framework in light of this, emerging foci are: changing demographics over time (influenced in part by implications of climate change); health literacy and accessibility of the healthcare system (especially for marginalized populations); visibility of a cross-border system across media channels and networks; and challenges of an intercultural mix of both patients and healthcare workers.  

TECHNOLOGICAL

Technology can be used to the advantage of health-care especially for an efficient transfer of health record, discharge summaries and prescription between the patient and the different providers of the different States. The European Union promotes what it calls e-health which helps the countries to promote this kind of system. We must first assess the use of ICT within each country involved before looking at the possibility of a cross-border platform.

LEGAL

Concerning the legal framework, as we want to transfer data from different infrastructure across borders, the protection of the patient’s data is an issue. The European Union regulates it and has harmonized it quite a lot since 2016. However, as some discretion is left to the Member States, we must assess if there are any relevant differences in the implementation of these rules between the three states. A second legal issue is a fact that patients are not the only ones traveling from one country to another but the doctors as well, which raises the concern on their liability. Finally, for the ‘center’ to be recognized and advertised as the biggest center of pediatric surgery in Europe providing high-quality care, it needs to have a special legal status. We are currently carrying out a comparative study between existent European cross-border health care cooperation.

ENVIRONMENTAL

Environmental factors are the ecological and environmental aspects that will influence the operation of an organization. For the project thus far, aspects have come up in terms of benefits, impacts, and long-term planning and implications. Within these areas, the benefits of an e-Health approach and potential impacts of medical team mobility (primarily on emissions) are interesting areas of focus, particularly in the context of local, regional, and national commitments for managing energy usage and greenhouse gas emission production. Climate change poses future challenges in likely increasing the number of climate refugees, and in increasing disease transmission (to which pediatric populations are more vulnerable).

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Project Start

Hello! Welcome to our Tumblr, where we will be documenting the course of our PREMIUM project. Our work over the next few months will be for a collaboration between our two clients, ITEM and MUMC+. ITEM is a research institute of Maastricht Unviersity (UM) that is focused on studying cross-border issues, and MUMC+ is the hospital here in Maastricht. Our goal is to assist the clients in identifying barriers to providing cross-border healthcare between the pediatric surgical centers in Maastricht, Aachen, and Liege. Currently, our team is using the PESTLE framework to conduct background research on cross-border healthcare in the region. 

Now that we have introduced the main goal of the project, we’d like to introduce the team! 

Capucine (Cap) Frasie is a French student at European Law School of Maastricht University. Following a master specialized into market integration as well as being a PREMIUM candidate, she is curious about how to specialize not only in theory but also in practice. She loves enjoying nature on her bike and thinking on her actions to sustain it in the long term.

Daan Baeten is a master student in Governance & Leadership in European Public Health, originating from the country of fries and waffles (Belgium!). He has a background in both biotechnology and biomedical sciences and is interested in European politics and LGBT+ health and rights. Besides university, you can find him travelling Europe or working another student job to pay for his next journey. 

Mara Midiere is a master student in Sustainability Science and Policy born and raised near San Francisco, California. She finished her bachelor’s degrees last year in organizational communication and environmental ethics and policy. Mara is passionate about working to create socially equitable societies for the future. When she is in an area with mountains (sorry, Netherlands) she loves to go hiking, and also sings in the UM choir. 

Anniina Cansel is an empathetic Global Health master’s student with a background in rehabilitation as a physiotherapist. She has a previous master’s degree from UM in Human Movement Sciences with a specialization in health and rehabilitation. She is originally from Finland and enjoys spending her free time being active outdoors or relaxing at home with her family and dog. 

Patrick Steskens is currently doing a master’s in Controlling and Accounting. He was born and raised in the Netherlands and did his bachelor’s at UM, except for an exchange in the fall of 2015 to Texas A&M University. In his free time he likes to do sports to push himself, and he will participate in a half triathlon in May. He also likes to make and arrange music, especially for the piano and percussion. 

Sara Mattsson is a first-year master student in International Law. She is originally from Finland, but came to Maastricht in 2015 to do her Bachelor in European Law. In her free time she enjoys playing football and reading books.

We are very excited for this project and are confident that our team will be able to have a successful and fun experience! Follow us for updates as our project progresses.