EPF Capacity Building Programme: Enabling Leadership and Positive Governance
Patient organisations and patient organisations’ leaders are becoming more visible actors and influencers in the healthcare arena. This is an important and positive change. Nevertheless, it also brings new and profound challenges, linked to knowledge-building, know-how sharing and leadership within organisations.
Strengthening patient organisations
With this in mind, in 2018 EPF launched a new capacity building module on Empowering Leadership and Positive Governance. The module aims at strengthening patient organisations by enhancing their leaders’ leadership skills and consequently enabling positive governance in their organisation. The overall objective is to support patient organisations in positioning themselves as legitimate stakeholders, strong advocates and reliable partners in the national and European health policy environment.
EPF received more than 70 applications for the 24 available places. The selected participants meeting specific criteria, come from 17 different countries and represent a good mix of European, national and local patient organisations. For the first time, EPF included two participants representing organisations from the Western Balkans.
The module started in April with an online kick-off session during which participants met each other and further defined the scope of the module. In May participants met face to face for a two-day training session in Bratislava.
During the two-day training participants:
- Built a safe and fruitful learning space;
- Reflected on their current leadership status and the challenges within this role;
- Learnt about new models of leadership and examples of good practices;
- Defined the milestones of their transformational work that will happen during the coaching phase.
The face-to-face training was followed by an intense coaching phase that will keep participants busy until early October when participants will gather again in Warsaw for a second face-to-face training, which we will report on in Autumn.
What is next?
Applications for the 2019 EPF Capacity Building Module on Leadership will open in early 2019, building on the learnings of 2018. In the meantime, we would like to recommend the books on Leadership that we used during the first face-to-face training in Bratislava:
- The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization by Peter M Senge
- The Essentials of Theory U by C. Otto Scharmer
- Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux
Contact person:
Elena Balestra, EPF Membership & Capacity Building Officer