In the late 90s and the early part of the new millennium a number of health care organisations were beginning to realise the importance of supporting patients to be more empowered in managing their own health, and in becoming proactive partners in their own care. These approaches recognised that patients were expert in their lived experience of long term health conditions.

This came together at the Careum Congress in 2010 which gave birth to the European network on Patient Empowerment (ENOPE). The ENOPE congresses have helped shape the European Commissions future strategy on Patient Empowerment.

ENOPE members, largely coordinated by the European Health Futures Forum, went on to collaborate on a number of European projects including:

• The EMPATHiE project: Empowering patients in the management of chronic diseases
• The PISCE project: promotion of self-care systems in the European Union & Platform of experts
• PROSTEP project (promoting self-management in chronic diseases Report on progress of the PROSTEP project

Presentations from the ENOPE conferences can be found here.

The increasing need to share expertise in approaches that supported empowerment across Europe led to EHFF and ENOPE successfully approaching the Robert Bosch foundation for funding.

In 2018 The Centre for Empowering patients and communities – CemPaC- was launched, its programme board contains many of the original ENOPE founders and takes forward the key objectives of ENOPE.