The 18th General Assembly of EHPPA association was held online on the 25th of November 2021.
During the morning session, the members had the opportunity to share latest news from their organisations and countries. The presentations done by all members have started many discussions and highlighted the fact that we are still facing the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. All EHPPA members are putting a lot of effort into securing of supplies and are trying to avoid shortages due to raw material, production and logistic problems. In this context, it was decided to start a new working group on the topic of securing of supplies in order to share knowledge and look for a common solution rather than being in competition.
The highlight of the General Assembly was the election of new President and Board for the 2021 – 2023 mandate. Mario Comba, EHPPA president since 2019, has summed up his mandate and said his goodbyes as he is also leaving his position at SCR Piemonte.
The new president of the association is Danny Havenith, director of the Belgian central purchasing body MercurHosp. In the past mandate, he had the position of vice-president in charge of EHPPA Days and other conferences and he knows the association very well already. He presented his candidature together with an ambitious program an strategy to be implemented during his 2 years mandate.
The Board will be comprised of 5 vice-chair(wo)men whose roles and responsibilities will be further defined during the first Board meeting in early December. The 5 designated vice-presidents are the following:
Trine Ann Behnk from Amgros, Denmark
Patrizia Gamerro from SCR Piemonte, Italy
Antoni Gilabert Perramon from Consorci, Spain
Gerwin Meijer from IAZ, the Netherlands
Louis Potel from Resah, France
We also had an extensive afternoon session during which the following topics were discussed:
The new Board will work on internal and external communication aspects. Regarding the external communication, it was decided to create a new EHPPA website, increase our presence on social media (mainly through LinkedIn and Twitter posts) and regularly present EHPPA at events and conferences.
The members participating to the joint cross border procurement initiative have presented the latest developments and the activities to be done in the coming months.
For the session on securing supplies, we have invited Louise Knight, professor of public sector & healthcare procurement at University of Twente, to present us her latest research on the topic. This led to the discussion about EHPPA’s engagement with the new European agency HERA.
In order to strengthen EHPPA’s position on European level, the Board have decided to present a pre-selection of calls to which EHPPA members could respond together. The members showed interest in a PPI project that will be prepared between January and April 2022 by those motivated to participate.
Un update of the preparations of 1st Pan-European Healthcare Procurement Summit was shared. The co-hosts, EHPPA and Health Proc Europe, are currently in the crucial phase of sponsor search in order to ensure the organisation of the event in September 2022.
Finally, a proposal of “EHPPA Innovation Days” – an internal bi-annual event to present innovative solutions was shared. The concept will be further developed by Consorci – with Toni Gilabert being the vice-president for Innovation – and Resah.
