Re: EUSCREEN application will be granted by EU

Dear Colleagues

We are delighted to hear that our EU grant application will, in principle, be funded. The scores and evaluation we got were almost the highest possible.

Frea and I would like to thank all of you for your tremendous commitment in the application for this study. We have appreciated your commitment in the past three years very much. The first and the second, very extensive, questionnaire have been filled out by many of you without prospect of anything more than co-authorship in Frea’s publication. All contributors who filled out the extensive questionnaire for their country will be listed as co-author in the appendix of these articles specifying the EUSCREEN Study Group. The few among you who have not filled out the extensive questionnaire yet should start right away and send it to Frea.

The time is right to compare the vision and hearing screening programmes in Europe that differ so much from each other. Our cost-effectiveness model is the right tool to do that. The study is a European necessity in times of health-expenditure cuts, especially for EU countries that have little or no vision and hearing screening yet.

From now one, we will share the benefits of the study. We will exchange information, experience and skill about vision and hearing screening in 41 EU-countries. We will compare the cost-effectiveness of the screening programmes in these 41 countries with the cost-effectiveness model. We will introduce cost-effective vision and hearing screening programmes in Romania and Albania and study the implementation process. Towards the end of the study we will have more cost-effective screening in all EU countries and we will have the TOOLKIT with the cost-effectiveness model available in the public domain.

Herb Simonsz and Frea Sloot