Theme 5: Managing Food Allergies across Europe (Horizontal Activities)
Leader: Charlotte Madsen
Overall Aim
The major activity of Theme 5 was to ensure integration of the project activities, so that the partnership was (1) to share the new knowledge gained through the activities in Themes 1-4 during the project, (2) to process and transform it into new management strategies. Theme 5 also channelled these to the relevant stakeholder groups.
Integrating Knowledge- Ethics, Training, Gender and Intellectual property
Ethics- through the cross-Theme Ethical Committee the project monitored ethical issues associated with project activities.(Work Leader: Clare Mills)
Training- the focus was to exchange knowledge and skills across the partnership to support project activities and included proactive monitoring of good clinical practice in the EuroPrevall clinical centres. (Work Leader: Harry Wichers)
Gender- cross-theme activities were undertaken to assess gender issues in the project partnership and those relating to the burden of food allergies (Work Leader: Ineke Klinge)
Intellectual Property- the partnership pro-actively sought to monitor intellectual property discovered in the project and its exploitation, including post-project resource access. (Work Leader: Rupert Osborn)
Managing Food Allergies (Work Leader: Carla Bruijnzeel-Koomen, Charlotte Madsen)
One of the key ways in which knowledge was shared across the partnership was through the workshops. The training tools developed in this Theme were designed to promote knowledge and understanding of food allergy management in a holistic, trans-disciplinary, pan-European manner, with the ultimate output of a pool of well-trained, employable, experts.
Through Theme 5 the EuroPrevall partners established a formal mechanism for integrating the knowledge generated, together with external knowledge about food allergy through a series of state-of-the-art papers on the major elements of the project:
- prevalence,
- primary prevention,
- thresholds,
- diagnostic methods,
- management of food allergy.
This process incorporated the needs and views of the stakeholder groups including food allergic consumers, clinicians, nurses, dieticians, food manufacturing and the catering industry. The outputs of these activities can be found through the online Food Allergy Information Platform (FAIP) and web-based reports, which are freely available for translation into other languages [Link to Lay].