Welcome to the EAP Newsletter, February 2023 edition! We'll start with a message from the European Academy of Paediatrics’ Secretary General, Dr. Ann De Guchtenaere.
We caught up with Prof. Dr. Ann de Guchtenaere,
Secretary General of the EAP, to talk about the potential of the EAP to achieve
equity in child-care and help find solutions to societal challenges...
By working at a European level, I’ve
experienced the broad reach of the EAP and its great potential to make an
impact. In my opinion, we will need this level of impact to achieve
equity for all children in Europe, respecting their rights at all times, and
certainly in relation to health-care.
Creating equal opportunities for children, this
is what we at EAP invest the majority of our time in: by researching the
best care, best medicines and best solutions for children, by providing strict
training requirements and competences for paediatricians, as well as by
promoting, campaigning and advocating for the benefit of the youngest members
of our society.
But to create these equal opportunities
for children, we need (wo)manpower. And one of our main challenges in the long
term is to empower the paediatric workforce. It is vital to educate and involve
more paediatricians, in community care as well as in hospital care, in
front of patients instead of in front of PC’s. Let us focus on
having the right people, with the right skills, in the right place, so that
they can provide the best care for children in need. In other words, we play a
key role in working with the UEMS, to make sure that the necessary training and
education is safeguarded and guaranteed in the future, whether that be in
preventative, primary, secondary or tertiary care.
And for creating these equal opportunities for
children and paediatricians, we are able to cooperate with national partners to
promote our achievements and initiatives across the European Union and beyond,
for the benefit of our children. And it works both ways: whilst countries
benefit from the EAP, the EAP also benefits from national guidance and
experiences from individual countries. It is greater even than the sum of
its parts.
The unique structure of the EAP (with a
scientific, educational and strategic task) inspired me as President of the
Belgian Academy of Paediatrics (https://baop.be/)
to work on a full merger of the 5 existing paediatric societies in Belgium.
Because as always, only by working together can we complement and enrich one
another.
As a mother of three, a paediatrician,
President of the Belgian Academy of Paediatrics and Secretary General of the
EAP I have learnt over the past 47 years, getting and taking opportunities is
not part of your DNA, it is about the people surrounding you, that is what
equal opportunities and equity are all about.
Achieving equal opportunities is much more than
just good luck, it's about what your environment gives you, about what you can
learn, at school, from experience, or from the people around you.
Achieving equal opportunity doesn't just
happen, we as a society have a responsibility to organise it for every
paediatrician and to realize it for every child.
And it is by working together as an EAP
community that we will achieve this!
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