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European Innovation Partnership

In July 2020, Scotland was awarded funding by the EU European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing (EIP on AHA) to undertake a twinning project with the Basque Country on scaling up Video Consultation. The two project partners are the Scottish Government’s Digital Health and Care Division and the Basque Country’s Kronikgune Institute for Health Services Research. The project will run from August to November 2020.

The objective of the Twinning project is to progress collaboration and knowledge exchange between two EIP on AHA 4-star Reference Sites to enhance the implementation of video-conferencing services to address the increased demands on primary care services. The twinning’s operational objectives include:

Provide information and provide access to existing video-conferencing services in Scotland to enable Basque experts to acquire knowledge and skills in the use of Attend Anywhere services, with a primary focus on business model and service redesign.

Assess the feasibility of transferring the learning to the context of the Basque Country.

Develop Implementation Plan about how the different elements of good practice could be adapted and transferred.

Promote inter-regional partnerships between entities and local stakeholders.

Evaluate compliance with these objectives.

The two regions organised a first knowledge exchange workshop on 23rd October 2020, where each region presented the status of video consultation in their region, what has worked well and what their current challenges are.

Presentations from the workshop

EIP-on-AHA-Video-Consultation-Twinning-Webinar-Scottish-Slides

EIP-on-AHA-Video-Consultation-Twinning-Webinar-Basque-Country-Slides

A further knowledge exchange workshop took place in mid-November 2020 to enable the twinning partners to discuss a number of critical aspects of video consultation implementation in more depth.

EIP-AHA-Video-Consultation-Twinning-Workshop-Slides

The twinning partners have also taken part in a dissemination session at the Scottish Digital Health and Care Event DigiFest, in December 2020.

The twinning partners have produced a Twinning Final Report on the twinning activities of Scotland as originator and Basque Country as adopter. The report outlines the key learning outcomes from the twinning activities and it is available to view here.

Twinning Support Scheme 2020 – Video Consultation – Final Report

You can find out more about the EIP on AHA twinning programme on the European Commission’s website.

To keep up-to-date with the progress of the twinning, please follow us on TECScotland

Our work

The Digital Health and Care Directorate is involved in a wide range of work across health.

Our Strategy

Scotland’s refreshed Digital health and care strategy was launched on 27th October 2021. A joint initiative between the Scottish Government and COSLA, it outlines approaches to improve the care and wellbeing of people in Scotland.