The company Sincera has received funding from Lighthouse Life Science to scale their already existing solution. In collaboration with The Danish Healthy Cities Network under WHO, Sincera will create a platform that can accelerate the extension of prevention efforts aimed at young people with well-being issues.
In Denmark, more than 60.000 young people aged 16-24 live under the radar.
They neither go to school or work, and they aren’t really noticed because they mostly stay in their rooms at home. In many cases, these young people aren’t detected by the municipal systems, as they are quiet and not seen as a burden.
However, things could look different in five or ten years. By then, these young people could receive cash assistance, have developed unhealthy habits such as smoking, alcohol, obesity or perhaps even worse; fall into crime or substance abuse.
The company Sincera aims to address and reverse this development with the eHOOD program, which is targeted at young people in lower secondary education, explains Niels Damgaard-Jensen, project manager and partner at Sincera. He believes that well-being issues often can be prevented with a systemic effort involving the child and their family.
Many of the young people we’ve had in the eHOOD program are really struggling. When we talk about well-being issues, they aren’t just a little sad – these are young people who, for example, have violence and drugs in their daily lives, have addiction in the home, or homeless fathers. Others have a stronger support system but suffer from severe anxiety, school refusal, and more or less clarified conditions, says Niels Damgaard-Jensen.
The eHOOD project has been tested and is to be allocated to the municipalities, and the eHOOD project have recently received funding from the Life Science Lighthouse to scale their solution to more municipalities.
The eHOOD program, which started in 2019, has been evaluated with positive results in the municipalities of Tårnby and Gladsaxe.
Using gaming and games as an approach, eHOOD creates a committed community where young people are coached in nutrition, sleep, exercise and good habits, while also receiving help with the significant difficulties they face. The young people step out of their rooms, find communities, and begins to reconnect with school and society.
The Life Science Lighthouse has allocated funding to scale up the program - and this phase will be both challenging and necessary, notes Niels Damgaard-Jensen. A central challenge is the dislocation between the effort and the effect, as it can be difficult to quantify the value.
What does it mean economically to help a young person avoid well-being issues compared to the alternative? The short-term economic benefit of eHOOD will typically be relatively limited, while the long-term effect will be substantial. The program helps to activate the young people’s talents, enabling them to complete their education and connect with the labour market, says Niels Damgaard-Nielsen.
Sincera has also experienced challenges in engaging with the right decision-makers in municipalitites, as each minucipality has a different organization structure.
There is no fixed structure for who makes decisions, so it is incredibly difficult for a company to get through with a solution. It could be a health director in one municipality, a school chief in another, or a mayor in yet another. Together with The Danish Healthy Cities Network, we now want to create an open dialogue about the opportunities for preventing well-being issues among young people, says Niels Damgaard-Nielsen.
The Danish Healthy Cities Network is the Danish national network under WHO Healthy Cities in Europe. It consists of Danish municipalities and regions that work together in a joint forum to address social inequality in the healthcare sector.
Additionally, Sincera has involved external consultant Hans Uldall-Poulsen, who specializes in developing innovative partnership models that create the financial foundation for preventive efforts.
Together, they will create a scaling platform that can make it more attractive for municipalities to invest in initiatives like eHOOD.
Charlotte Iisager Petersen, Niels Damgaard-Jensen and Hans Uldall-Poulsen are assembling their expertise to describe the preventive efforts economically and turn eHOOD into an investment case.
As development consultant Hans Uldall-Poulsen puts it, municipal budgets typically consist of heart money and logic money.
Everyone can agree that eHOOD makes human sense, but it’s hard to fit into the everyday reality of municipal budget constraints. Unfortunately, human sense is rarely sufficient when it comes to raising funds for new initiatives, says Hans Uldall-Poulsen.
He explains that “heart money” goes to good causes such as preventing well-being issues among young people or preventing loneliness among the elderly. These budgets are usually limited compared to large logic budgets, where municipalities evaluate initiatives based on a solid economic business case. Therefore, it is crucial to create models and language that can demonstrate that an initiative provide concrete value in the short or long term.
“What we focus on is taking some of the good initiatives that create human value and placing them within a different setting. When the initiative makes sense from narrow budgetary logic and financing perspective, we can open up other types of accounts and access other financial opportunities to do what we all know is right” says Hans Uldall-Poulsen.
While Hans Uldall-Poulsen act as the project’s economic interpreter, Charlotte Lisager Petersen is the head of the secretary of The Danish Healthy Cities Network, where she acts as the key into municipal operations.
Charlotte Lisager Petersen works to systematically connect health to all welfare areas and create synergy among the actors in the field.
In The Danish Healthy Cities Network, eHOOD can be presented on a much larger scale, and members can contribute to gaining more experience with the program. The municipal members of The Danish Healthy Cities Network inspire and support each other in developing and implementing local public health initiatives, says Charlotte Lisager Petersen.
We see the collaboration with Sincera and Hans Uldall-Poulsen as an excellent opportunity to address well-being issues among young people – and we look forward to gaining more insights into the economic description of preventive efforts. Particularly demonstrating eHOOD as an investment case is interesting and necessary for municipal preventive work, says Charlotte Lisager Petersen.
She points out that individual initiatives can show experiences and results within a given period, but long-term effects often remain unclear and hard to link to the specific initiative.
Our challenge with this “heart budget” is that it typically falls under a health administration with limited budgets for prevention, while the long-term benefits lie in other municipal administrative areas – or possibly at the regional or national level. We wish that the understanding, that everyone is responsible for public health, were even clearer. We expect this collaboration to contribute to that, says Charlotte Lisager Petersen.
The vision is to use the funding from the life science lighthouse to strengthen collaboration between municipal departments and external partners and to create lasting changes in the approach to youth health. By incorporating evidence-based methods and ongoing data collection, eHOOD aims to deliver results that can support future investments in youth health programs, explains Niels Damgaard-Jensen.
The well-being issues experienced by young people not only affects their own lives but also has societal costs. In many municipalities, there is a focus on symptom management through school transportation and lost income for parent who are unable to work due to their children’s well-being issues. This costs municipalities billions, but they pay it because they have no other options. This I the awakening or movement we are trying to raise awareness about. There are indeed other options, says Niels Damgaard-Jensen.