The IRENE COST Action has concluded its first year and with it its first Grant Period. However, rather than to see this as something ending, we prefer to view this as a beginning, specifically the beginning of the second Grant Period. We have prepared and succesfully submitted a new Work & Budget Plan for next year, and in this short overview I will quickly outline what's there to look forward to, along with the goals we aim to achieve.
For GP2, we have assembled the following list of Grant Period Goals:
Develop an implementation strategy in stroke care measurement for inclusiveness target countries.
Collect and provide examples of best practice in implementation of stroke care quality measures from different countries and to share them with the stroke community.
Establish cooperation with different stroke care quality registries to harmonise data collection methodologies for better stroke care quality benchmarking.
Improve the expertise of scientists from inclusiveness target countries in communication of science to the public and the media.
Develop and provide national level and site level reports on stroke care quality for at least 15 countries based on the data collection.
Conduct >5 joint research projects on hospital-based stroke care quality by the end of the 2nd grant period and support promoting their research results through ITC grants, STSM and dissemination activities.
Establish National Working Groups of stroke leaders in all cooperating inclusiveness target countries involved in WG2 for leading stroke care quality measurement.
Develop and provide tools to support building and strenghting leadership in stroke in inclusiveness target countries through training, methodology support and networking.
Issue Annual Summary Reports on stroke care quality evidence in >5 countries during the 2nd grant period.
Submit >3 papers on stroke care quality or a similarly relevant topic published by IRENE COST Action members during the 2nd grant period.
The core activity to meet many of these goals remains in physical meetings, which had to be rescheduled due to the coronavirus-related restrictions. As these restrictions are being gradually repealed and life slowly returns to normalcy, we will also be ramping up our in-person meetings. The dates of these currently remain tentative and we will inform you once all parties involved confidently agree that the dangers of meetings have truly abated.