Digital health solutions to fight pain awarded at the European level

We are at the Second Edition of the European Civic Prize on Chronic Pain promoted by Active Citizenship Network and managing to carry out this work by expanding the number of experiences collected is a source of pride. For 40 good practices collected around Europe, there will be another 4,000 or 400,000 that we have missed, and in the end we hope so.

In our own, we will strive to recover and promote as many as possible, being aware of the fact that from year to year the constituency of the actors sensitive to the fight against pain is widening and becoming stronger and stronger: we are very happy of this result, given the role we plan to play in this area.

We like to think that good practices are also a small, but significant indicator of the health status of our healthcare systems, which have long been under pressure between the need for economic sustainability and high expectations of the population. Health protection as a common good should be the common denominator that unites the many stakeholders involved in the health sector, same as the fight against every form of inequality in access to therapies and the guarantee of the quality standards. The area of pain is no exception: reducing inequalities to allow a better quality of life for people suffering from chronic pain is the challenge we face in the coming years.

From the good practices collected it emerges clearly that, as often happens, it is the team and not the individual that wins: multidisciplinary medical teams, collaboration between the public and private sectors, dialogue between the world of research and patient associations, involvement of civil society, etc. they are always present in most of these experiences.

Taking into account that the 4 winning practices of the II° Edition of the Prize are all digital solutions, more precisely mobile apps, we intend to deepen the connection between digital health & pain not only by using the most recent innovations but also considering what is the level of empowerment that is required from pain patients to be able to take full advantage of these devices;

Mariano Votta
Director Active Citizenship Network
(November 25th, 2019)