Dissemination of the resilience assessment tool to the various stakeholders of the cardiac care pathways is a well-defined task under the third work package. It will be undertaken by all Consortium partners having connections with such stakeholders, with We CARE and GISE in the lead roles thanks to their respective extensive networks.
Proactively raising awareness and communicating about the project and its objectives is therefore crucial from the onset of the initiative. Since launch, the RESIL-Card consortium has seized a few opportunities to reach out to healthcare professionals specialised in cardiovascular care.
In May, specific actions to give the project visibility were planned during EuroPCR, the world’s leading course in interventional cardiovascular medicine gathering over 10,000 participants. In addition to some advertising and a fund-raising initiative, a dedicated session with the European PCR Companions (PCR loyalty programme members) as well as an interview with Prof Wijns and Prof Klazinga, two principal investigators of the project, were scheduled. Communicating about the project was also the opportunity to encourage the PCR Companions from the EU Member States and Ukraine to complete the large-scale survey run at that time about the disruptive impact of the COVID pandemic on the cardiovascular care pathways and the innovative solutions implemented to ensure care continuity.
A few weeks later, as GISE hosted its annual ‘ThinkHeart’ conference gathering representatives of health professionals, policy-makers, administrators, and patients to discuss the definition of a model of interventional cardiology in constant positive evolution and truly sustainable, the RESIL-Card project was presented by Dr Francesco Saia during a specific session addressing “Access to care: the patient perspective and the resilience of health services”.
In June, Dr Fina Mauri took the opportunity of the Spanish PCI Working Group meeting to introduce RESIL-Card and seek the organisation’s endorsement for the future steps of the project.
Raising awareness about the project and objectives was also extensively undertaken on social media during the time-period the WP1 survey was active. A press release and an article in the Daily Wire journal were published during the EuroPCR week. Also in May, the RESIL-Card project was invited to be featured in Healthmanagement’s second issue ‘Transforming through data’.
Regular communications to healthcare professionals are scheduled until the end of the project to foster a broad adoption of the tool, as some will also be towards patients and public as well as policy-makers, pending the exact patient’s role in the final resilience assessment tool.
