Dear members of the EUPHA Health promotion section,

One of the most enduring mantras of health promotion is that our job as public health practitioners, policy makers, and researchers, is to enable “people to increase control over, and to improve, their health” (WHO, 1986). This control can obviously be improved by strengthening people’s attitude, knowledge, motivation, skills, and literacy. Health literacy with its emancipatory approach is definitely a key strategy to improve population control over its health and our colleagues of the EUPHA Health literacy section are working hard at it.

Yet, there is strong evidence this is insufficient to make a significant difference in how much control people have over their health. We need health promotion programmes and policies that go beyond leveraging the efforts individuals can put in to protect and promote their own health and the health of their loved ones: we must work on settings, and interventions must target complex issues. This needs to be a priority in our work in order to prevent or counter what has been repeatedly denounced has a lifestyle drift in programme and policy making. Suffice to look at how much harms to people’s health are associated with daily exposure to poverty, stigmatisation, discrimination, poor housing, austerity measures, and other upstream determinants of population health to see where our ambitions should lead us to.

Unfortunately, a large share of the investment in health promoting programmes is still dominated by a biomedical perspective focusing on individual risk factors and putting pathologies and behaviours as the entry door to public health action. One only has to look at what is funded and published in terms of interventional research, and to the ever-expanding list of communications of past EUPHA conferences to conclude that we have much to say on how to improve individual risk factors, but little on how to collectively improve daily living conditions that slowly kills us and are key drivers of persistent health inequalities.

Building capacities of health promotion in Europe in addressing the upstream social determinants of health is a core aim of the EUPHA Health Promotion Section. With your help and the dedicated efforts of the members of the Steering Committee, we pledge to advance and provide more visibility to strategies improving daily living conditions, transforming life settings and engaging communities to leverage sufficient power to impact bureaucratic processes and policies and block harmful profit-driven initiatives.

We hope we can count on you to tackle this challenge. This is your section! Do not hesitate to get involved, to suggest activities we can organise with you and ways for us to facilitate your engagement.

Thank you for reading this Newsletter

Eric Breton, President of the Health Promotion Section

The members of the Steering Committee: Chrysanthi Tatsi, Dulce Maria do Nascimento do Ó, Ekaterina Volevach, Elisabeth Noehammer, John Dierx, Karina Leksy, Michelle Baybutt, Monica O’Mullane, Roosa-Maria Savela, Sherihane Bensemmane, Suzannah D’Hooghe and, Ursula Griebler.

The 2024 European Public Health conference

We are looking forward to meeting you in Lisbon for the 17^th European Public Health Conference. Two important rendezvous we would be delighted to welcome you to:

Tuesday 12 November, 9:00 – 17:00 Lisbon time: come to our pre-conference: “Establishing the effectiveness of complex health promotion interventions: shining light on alternatives”. This is your opportunity to engage in and contribute to a most useful and interesting conversation on what makes it so hard to prove the effectiveness of complex health promotion programmes and what alternative strategies we can adopt to make a convincing case when publishing and getting grants. It will be a very interactive day filled with real-life examples. All participants will be invited to contribute with their ideas and to the closing statement that will be issued following the meeting.

This pre-conference is organized jointly with the UNESCO Chair Global Health & Education. Hurry up, only 40 participants can register.

On November 14, 12.55 to 13.55 Lisbon time, we would be very happy to welcome you to our annual Join the Network meeting. This is not only an opportunity to meet the Health Promotion Section team but also your fellow Section members. This year we want to use this time to set the priorities for 2025. It is only an hour long, but we will make it as interactive as possible. Please join us – your contribution is what we are looking for!

Upcoming HP Section activity: A webinar in December!

Interested in professional development? Do not miss the next webinar of the Health Promotion Section: “Professional development in Health Promotion: A look at health promotion study programmes in Europe”. 13.30 CET December 13, 2024. The webinar is organised by Karina Leksy (Poland), Kevin Dadaczynski (Germany), and Monica O’Mullane (Ireland) members of the HP Section Steering Committee who will have different speakers sharing their experience. A nice opportunity to get a sense of current trends in Europe. Stay tuned for the detailed programme. You can register here.

Other news that may be of interest to you

• The next International Society for Physical Activity and Health (ISPAH) congress will be hosted in Paris from 28^th – 31^st October 2024 https://congress2024.ispah.org/
• The European Forum on Prevention and Primary Care will take place on 5-6 March 2025 in Zagreb. More info at https://forum.europrev.eu/. Sherihane Bensemmane, who is on our Steering Committee, said that although it’s about prevention, there is also room for health promotion topics.
• It is official! The 25^th IUHPE World Conference on Health Promotion, will be held in Abu Dhabi, May 13-16, 2025. There is a temporary website, the real one will come up soon. See the editorial in Global Health Promotion by Evelyne de Leeuw and Mumtaz Meeran describing the conference theme.

Finally

Our most heartfelt best wishes to our vice-president, Camila Picchio, who is now on maternity leave.