Background
The way the Dutch health care system is organised can be better described as illness-care. It is a reactive system, in which action is taken when a person's health deteriorates. The current system will eventually become both financially and practically unfeasible; it will become unaffordable and leads to a labour demand many times greater than the supply. The system must be revised so that the starting point is not health care but “care for health”; a system centred around a healthy lifestyle in a healthy environment.
Objectives
Hi!Noord is a collection of projects supported by REACT-EU. Each project has its own complex context and develops its own impact pathways. Hi!Noord accelerates the transition from healthcare to "care for health" in the Northern Netherlands by bringing together and scaling up the lessons on solutions from the projects. Hi!Noord focuses on sustainable ecosystem development in which further integration of stakeholders, initiatives, knowledge, resources and strategy is central and works on:
- Connection: Impact through sustainable connection, engagement of stakeholders and articulation of collective needs
- Development: Impact through collaborative action in supporting northern innovation and scale-up issues
- Secure knowledge: Impactful (system) innovation through research, training and learning evaluation
- Northern Netherlands' vision and strategy development
Athena’s role
Hi!Noord indicates that the programme and its projects can be monitored and evaluated for progress and impact, with the aim of growing into a long-term transition-oriented programme. Hi!Noord works with Reflexive Monitoring in Action (RMA). The Athena Institute evaluates the progress of the programme in a reflexive manner, with the aim of accelerating and sustainably securing system changes. The Athena Institute has formulated the following goals for the reflexive monitoring of Hi!Noord:
- Evaluating output and impact at both individual project and programme level
- Visualising pathways to impact
- Support learning and reflection within projects, between projects, regionally and nationally to increase the output and impact of projects and programmes, to:
- Initiate the transition to a health-promoting living environment together with relevant stakeholders
Lessons and outcomes
There are three major desired changes within Hi!Noord, that should start contributing to accelerating the transition from health care to care for health:
- The inhabitants of the Northern Netherlands are sustainably healthier and more satisfied
- There will be an infrastructure in place that enables a sustainable care system
- A restructuring takes place that enables a more sustainable health care system