ECPO 2019: Welcome & Partnership EASO JJ Sheree Bryant & Anna Citarrella Angel Martin

I’d like to introduce our co-hosts, Anna and Angel, who are from J&J and who have sponsored this event. I’d like to tell you a little bit about Piazzo to begin. There’s so many new faces here.

It’s great to see everyone. We have such a fantastic group. But I want to tell you a little bit about Piazzo to begin because I think some of you just don’t know Piazzo.

Okay, so Piazzo’s been around for a long time. And I think most of you know we’re a federation of medical and scientific organizations working on obesity across Europe. I’m going to go through these slides relatively quickly and anyone can meet with me at the parade if you have any questions.

But our mission is tackling unhealthy extra weight excessively across Europe. We do a lot of things. We are the leading voice of obesity science and medicine in Europe.

And we have a keen goal to establish obesity as a policy focus in Europe. If you see here this infographic on the side, we work with a large group of partners on this mission. Research, education, and policy are key focuses of Piazzo.

We do lots of education, training, and teaching. We meet with other clinical societies and organizations working on related disease areas. And we have e-learning platforms as well as in-person residential courses.

We certify and provide training for collaborating centers of obesity management across Europe. We have over 125 centers for obesity management now. You don’t get certified as a Piazzo center unless you have a comprehensive multi-stakeholder.

We’ve grown a lot. We’ve added 30 centers in the past year. But anyway, you have to have psychological support, nutritional support, physical activity coaching, as well as surgery and traditional medical care.

We have established an exchange and mentoring program for the collaborating centers. We bring in individuals and organizations interested in starting new centers because we see that as part of our goal. We want to expand these centers across Europe.

And we just launched an individual certification program as well for those who want to be certified and recognized as experts in science and medicine. We support various research projects. Some of you are familiar with the know-how project, which is focused on developing tools that might support long-term weight regain prevention or weight loss maintenance across Europe.

I think this will also be a useful tool globally because this is one of the key goals of weight loss. It’s long-term weight regain prevention. We have a new project called Protein, which will use AI tools and machine technology to try to develop tools for people to use in their ordinary lives to help support physical activity and nutrition to help them reach their goals.

The Sweet Project looks at the evidence around sugar alternatives and sugar alternates for weight loss prevention and maintenance. We have a lot of publications. Some of them are focused around our guidelines.

The clinical guidelines are published as they become available in the European Journal of Obesity, Obesity Facts. And we also have some really interesting cutting-edge, if you’ve never looked at the journal, some cutting-edge propositions like this ABCD of obesity. So the Obesity Management Task Force collaborators created this position statement around obesity as an adiposity-based chronic disease.

And we’re trying to get that message across throughout Europe. We do social media, as many of you know, and try to take the high road and share information about science and communicate with and support our colleagues at ECPO. So the Patient Council, which is now the ECPO, and evolved from the Patient Council, is a strong part of what EASO is about.

We support the voice of patients as well as the voice of clinicians. We have a campaign around European Obesity Day in 2019. It was in May.

It’s moving to March 4th in 2020. We’re supporting the World Obesity Federation collaborative effort with other obesity organizations across the world. And our event was, our day, was the biggest obesity-focused presence globally.

300 million people were involved in the campaign. We have a policy conference, which will be on March 4th this year, 2020 rather, and it coincides with Obesity Day. It’s prefaced by an advocacy training event, which is absolutely a key part of our mission as well.

And we supported a toolkit for our national associations. So these 34 national associations, many of which are, you’re connected with, I hope, are our constituency as well. The message packs and campaign artwork, it’s undecided exactly how we’ll support this year, but we are hoping to provide materials for the national associations as well as each national patient organization or the groups that are interested in promoting World Obesity Day across Europe.

We provide grants as well for successful and creative initiatives around Obesity Day, and we’re hoping to continue to do that in 2020. So, check out the website and learn more. Thank you very much.

Good morning. I am Manoji Berraila. I’m Communication and Public Affairs Director at Johnson & Johnson Medical Device, Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Johnson & Johnson is one of the world’s largest companies in the healthcare sector, with 130 companies in different countries in the world, and more than 130,000 people. We are here today because of the purpose of our company. We blend hard science and ingenuity to change the trajectory of human health.

So we are here today to partner with you because we have the ambition to work with you to change the trajectory of human health. And in order to do this, we share our knowledge and expertise in the areas that we are most confident as a company, where we have a lot of expertise, like communication and advocacy with ANGEL, because we feel that it’s important that we co-create and work with you to help patient people, as you mentioned, as you state, to have a different life. So our ambition is that we are more than sponsors.

We co-create with you. These days together are a real co-creation. We had a lot of conversation about what could be best, who could be best to represent the different areas, and we are proud here today to say that we have achieved a great goal, because having all of you in front of us, it’s a great satisfaction for us.

We hope that you will enjoy those days, so we are not here to teach, we are here to share. And we hope that you will have really interactive days, and we hope to have also fun in discovering new ways of working and to make our life better. Thank you.

Good morning. My name is Angel Martin. I’m Spanish, but actually based in Belgium.

I’m responsible for Government Affairs and Policy in EMEA for Johnson & Johnson, mostly focused on medical devices. And actually I’m also very excited of being here, to be honest, to be really sharing these days with you. As I say, because we’re coming here to partner.

I’m one of the trainers, so you will see me later in the program for tomorrow, but actually we’re coming here also to learn, because as we say, this is a journey. We’re really trying to change policy that has not changed for many years. So it’s really a difficult task for all of us to do, and therefore we need to learn together, we need to partner, we need to co-create together.

So I think that’s the key thing. For Johnson & Johnson, this is important, because you say, why is this organization doing this? We have, like many other companies, a corporate code of conduct, a corporate social responsibility statement, that we call the Credo. And that Credo actually puts first patients, doctors, nurses, and their families.

And that’s really what really drives us. First we put that, because we know eventually that’s better for everyone, in health and well-being. So I would not say even healthcare, I would say beyond, it’s health and well-being.

So again, here today, for us it’s really a unique opportunity. We’re really grateful of IASO, of Manashe, of ECPO having us here today. And again, we wish you three very productive days, and thank you again for having us today.

Thank you.