BLOG – New Task Force Social Health already successful

Almost a year and half ago, in October 2014 during the Glasgow meeting, the initial idea was launched by the Interdem board to set up a think tank on social inclusion. There appeared much interest for this idea: 25 of the present Interdem members spontaneously expressed their interest to be involved. A first goal was to prepare a position paper focusing on the state of science, identification of gaps in knowledge and recommendations for research and practice. A second goal was to set up a research agenda and collaborative research based on the identified gaps and recommendations.

A small group, lead by Prof. Rose-Marie Dröes and Dr. Kevin Charras, and including  several  Interdem board members as advisors (Prof. Myrra Vernooij-Dassen, Prof. Esme Moniz-Cook and Prof. Rabih Chattat) discussed the procedure to follow. It was suggested to use the concept of Social health, with its three dimensions:  ‘capacity to fulfil ones potential and obligations’, ‘ability to manage life despite the disease’ and ‘participation in social activities’, as recently proposed by Huber et al. (2011), as the theoretical framework of the task force. The name of the social inclusion think tank was changed into Social Health Taskforce. In June 2015 a first inventory was carried out among Interdem members on their expertise on social health. Many members appeared to have done research in one or more of the social health dimensions. The results of the survey were presented in a first official Interdem taskforce meeting in Ljubljana in September 2015.

Based on the expertise of the taskforce members, three theme groups were formed, each lead by two members, who started to work on the operationalization of the three dimensions of social health for dementia by listing important themes for each dimension. During a task force consensus meeting in Berlin in October 2015, the theme lists were elaborated into four categories reflecting the operationalization of the three social health dimensions, factors influencing social health on each dimension, interventions effectively promoting social health, and gaps in knowledge. The operationalization of the dimensions of social health were send to the European Working Group of People With Dementia (EWGPWD), and an additional literature search was conducted by the theme groups to get insight into the latest knowledge on the identified themes. Based on the collected data the leaders of each theme group composed a draft text for the different dimensions of social health, which was then integrated into a full draft of the position paper, including recommendations for research and practice, by the task force leaders. The full draft paper was send to the theme groups, EWGPWD and three internal Interdem peer reviewers for their comments.

We plan to submit the paper in May to Aging and Mental health to be included in a special issue on Social health in Dementia (editors Rose-Marie Dröes and Marjolein de Vugt), which is planned to be published in December 2016. This special issue will focus on collaborative INTERDEM studies. Based on the Berlin symposium on social health, International Psychogeriatrics suggested a special issue on social health from a global perspective, acknowledging the different social values in different parts of the world. The guest editors are Myrra Vernooij-Dassen, Esme Moniz-Cook and Yun-Hee Jeon. An editorial of Vernooij-Dassen and Yeon on the relevance of social health in dementia research and practice has recently been published.

Based on the many recommendations for further research on social health in dementia made in the position paper, the next step of the social health taskforce will be to set the research agenda with priorities for research in the coming years and to explore opportunities for collaborative research. First steps for this will be made in the next taskforce meeting in Budapest in April 2016. We are very much looking forward to this!

Rose-Marie Dröes

Kevin Charras

  • Huber, M., Knottnerus, J. A., Green, L., van der Horst, H., Jadad, A. R., Kromhout, D., . . . Smid, H. (2011). How should we define health? BMJ, 343, d4163.
  • Vernooij-Dassen, M, Jeon ,YH (2016) Social health and dementia: the power of human capabilities Int Psychogeriatr 28,701-3.