A new kind of policy forum is taking shape around one of Europe's most pressing health challenges: how to build a brain health system that actually reflects the needs of the people living within it. A Value-Driven Future for Brain Health & Care, an interactive Policy World Café, will convene people with lived experience, carers, policymakers, clinicians, researchers, funders and industry representatives around the same table in Ireland, timed to the Irish Presidency of the Council of the European Union.
Why the format matters
Brain health policy has long suffered from a structural problem: the people most affected by neurological and mental health conditions are rarely the ones shaping the systems meant to serve them. Conferences tend to separate clinical, research and patient perspectives into parallel tracks that rarely intersect in the room where decisions get made. The World Café format is designed to break that pattern. Rather than a sequence of panels and keynote speeches, it uses rotating, facilitated small-group discussions so that a carer, a neuroscientist and a health ministry official might sit at the same table within the same hour, working through the same practical question.
That structure matters because brain health spans an unusually wide range of conditions - from dementia and stroke to mental illness and neurodevelopmental disorders - each with different care pathways, research needs and funding streams. Fragmentation across these areas has historically made coordinated policy difficult. A shared table does not resolve that fragmentation on its own, but it creates the conditions for common ground to emerge.
Four challenges, one closing dialogue
The event is structured around four facilitated challenges, each addressing a distinct part of the brain health pipeline:
- Lived experience - how patients and carers can shape care design rather than simply respond to it
- Prevention - reducing the onset and progression of brain-related conditions before they require intensive treatment
- Research-to-impact - closing the gap between scientific discovery and real-world clinical practice
- Value-driven care - aligning health-system resources with outcomes that matter to patients, not just activity measured in isolation
Each discussion is intended to produce concrete, shared recommendations rather than open-ended reflection. These are then carried directly into a closing policy dialogue, giving participants a route from conversation to something closer to an actionable proposal - a deliberate attempt to avoid the common fate of stakeholder events whose conclusions quietly disappear into a report nobody reads.
Why timing and geography matter
Holding this gathering during the Irish Presidency of the Council of the European Union is not incidental. Presidency periods give member states a window to set priorities and convene attention around issues they want to push up the EU agenda. Brain health, encompassing both neurological disease and mental health, sits at the intersection of ageing populations, workforce pressures on health systems, and the EU's broader push toward value-based healthcare models that reward outcomes rather than volume of treatment.
For a small country, hosting this kind of forum during its Presidency term is also a way of punching above its weight diplomatically - using convening power to influence a policy conversation that will ultimately play out at EU institutional level, where funding priorities, research programmes and cross-border health initiatives are decided.
What success looks like
The measure of this event will not be the number of attendees or the quality of the venue, but whether the recommendations generated in the room find their way into actual policy instruments - national strategies, EU funding calls, or research agendas. Bringing industry and funders into the same conversation as patients and carers also raises a familiar governance question: how to ensure commercial and institutional interests do not crowd out the voices of those with lived experience, even when everyone sits at the same table. A well-run World Café format, with trained facilitation and transparent reporting of outcomes, is one way of managing that tension rather than eliminating it outright.