Promoting Patient Engagement and Participation for Effective Healthcare Reform

Guendalina Graffigna received a PhD in Social Psychology at Catholic University of the Sacred Hearth of Milan (Italy) where she actually is Associate Professor. At the same University she teaches Qualitative Methodology, she is Associate Director for the II level Master Degree in Qualitative Methods applied to Social and Marketing Research and she is member of the Scientific Committee for the PhD School in Psychology. Guendalina is also editorial manager for the Journal Micro & Macro Marketing. Before her actual appointments, Guendalina has been a Post Doc fellow (A.A. 2007-2008) and visiting professor in Qualitative Methods (A.A. 2008-2009) at the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology, University of Alberta, with which she still collaborate for several research and teaching initiatives. Beside her academic achievements, Guendalina acts as qualitative scientific advisor at GfK-Eurisko in Milan where she is an online qualitative research specialist and she is Director the Study and Training Centre of ASSIRM (Italian Association of Marketing Research Institutes). In July 2012 Guendalina was awarded with the prize of Qualitative Health Research Leadership 2012 from the Global Congress for Qualitative Health Research Committee. Her research and scientific activities are mainly devoted to patient engagement in health and wellbeing, healthcare organization innovation and digital health. She has spent the last 10 years of activity in constructing a bridges between scientific/academic knowledge and professional practice, in the particularly sectors of consumer and health research. At present she is coordinating and intra and inter university reflection for contributing to priorities and policies discussions at the European Level on patient health engagement.