ECDC on air, the podcast of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.

Keeping up to date with European epidemiology.

Hello, my name is Nicholas and I'm your host for today's episode of ECDC on Air,

which is the podcast for the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control. Today I have with me, Gerion Ikink, who is

ECDC's principal expert on public health foresight. Gerion, can you start off by explaining

what is meant by foresight and why is it important? Sure. So, foresight, in a nutshell, is a systematic

participatory and well-informed way of

exploring, anticipating, and even shaping the future. It's a combination of using evidence,

expertise, interaction between these experts and creativity, bringing them together so you

mitigate the blind spots and the biases they have. So it's a sort of an umbrella

term for multiple forward-looking methods and they all have different kinds of approaches

and also all kinds of different applications. But they're all structured and they all usually

look at least 10 years ahead. Normally it is qualitative more than quantitative. We're using

it in a functional way, so to detect threats or find ways of innovating or shaping strategy.

And I think what's quite important is to mention that it shouldn't be mixed up with forecasting,

because forecasting is really using data from the past to extrapolate

to the future using some assumptions. But that basically the assumption is that the future is

something like the past and we know that actually that's not true. And also foresight is not

prediction. It's really about exploring possible futures and their implications together with

diverse expertise, but we're not claiming that we're predicting anything. Can you explain a little

bit more concretely? How is it being carried out? Because there's no data on the future, as the

future hasn't happened yet, we are looking at change in foresight. So we're identifying change, what kind of change

...