<< Blog

Preparing a Horizon 2020 Health proposal in 6 weeks? Challenge accepted!


9th August 2018 at 12:19 pm



There are under two months left until the submission deadline for seven two-stage Health calls closes. We firmly believe that with careful planning, a high quality short proposal or stage-1 proposal can still be prepared in the time remaining. A short proposal consists of 10 pages (usually 7-8 pages Excellence and 2-3 pages of Impact). The big benefit of this two-stage submission procedure for coordinators and their partner is receiving feedback without having to write a full proposal. Once the first stage has been passed, chances of receiving funding greatly increase. For example, last years’ two-stage calls in Personalised Medicine (PM) went from a 15% success rate in the first stage to a 30% success rate in the second stage.

For the first stage, the consortium should be complete, i.e. all project partners confirmed, the work plan set up and the innovation or “beyond the state-of-the-art” well defined. However, there is no need for complex budget calculations as a breakdown of the costs is not required, just the total requested EC funding. For anyone looking for a detailed description of how the procedure works, we have written about it in the past.

Thinking about writing a Health Proposal in six weeks?

There are seven upcoming 2-stage calls with the deadline of the first stage (short proposal) on the 2nd October 2018 and with the second stage deadline following half a year later on the 16th April 2019:

Six weeks timeline

Six weeks is not a long time to prepare and write a Horizon 2020 proposal. Even though we call the first stage the short proposal, careful planning is essential. With the submission deadline in less than two months, now is the time to get serious about your Health proposal. The picture below is our idea of the ideal timeline for a smooth short proposal preparation process:

Follow our recommended steps to complete a first stage Health proposal in under two months:

Updated Health Work Programme for 2019

The latest update to the Health Work Programme for 2019 is now available from the EC (PDF). While there are no major changes, there is one update alongside four new calls:

We can help you with your Health proposal

Interested in writing a proposal for any of the above-mentioned calls? Or are you looking for an experienced partner for project management or dissemination? If yes, then please contact us at +41 44 455 66 00 or through our website. We support both stage 1 and stage 2 proposals. Some of the health-related projects we have been involved in are:

The complete list of our current and previous projects can be found here.