EngageMinds HUB, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
EngageMinds HUB is the first Italian multidisciplinary research centre dedicated to the study and promotion of engagement, i. e. the active involvement of people in health behaviour and food consumption.
The activities of EngageMinds HUB are inspired by the principles of consumer and health psychology, that is, the study of the thoughts, motivations and behaviours that underlie our health and consumer choices.
The Research Centre was born from the interdisciplinary synergy between the Faculty of Psychology and the Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. The research, training and consulting activities promoted by EngageMinds HUB also rely on the collaboration of professors and researchers from different scientific fields (psychology; agriculture, food and environmental sciences; economics; medicine; law; sociology; banking sciences) at national and international level.
The Centre is active in two locations of Università Cattolica with two dedicated Divisions: "Healthcare" in the Milan Campus and "Food" in the Cremona Campus.
Role within miGut-Health
EngageMinds Hub leads work package 5: Patient & Citizen health engagement.
Today, measuring and promoting patient and citizen health engagement is considered a crucial asset in order to improve the care experience of patients.
The EngageMinds HUB (UCSC) research group has developed a psychological model (Patient Health Engagement Model – PHE) to assess and promote patient engagement that has proven effective in predicting patients’ empowerment, patients’ quality of life and their health literacy.
The model has been widely applied to the experience of IBD patients by demonstrating how it predicts well-being and quality of life, and further patients’ resilience and good self-management also in a situation of emergence. Furthermore, within the scope of the scientific debate about Patient Reported Experience Measurement, we have developed a specific scale (WeCare IBD Score) thanks to the involvement of patient representatives, and this measure is maximally reliable and sensible to patients’ needs. Based on this methodological framework, in order to ensure these goals in our task two samples from the different target groups (high-risk group, and patients) will be recruited and asked to fill out an online survey aimed at profiling participants according to their sociodemographic characteristics clinical status, lifestyle and psychological factors identified in the literature review as possible risk factors.
