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Background: Legal regulations and funding programmes of (integrated) urban development, both at the federal and Hamburg level, require socio-spatial collaboration with health promotion., Research Question: To what degree can the programmatic integration of health promotion into urban development be found in implementation documents?, Material and Methods: An internet search was conducted in the "Transparency Portal" of Hamburg, containing more than 100,000 official documents, using three approaches: 1.) search with 7 central concepts of urban development and the appearance of health themes within them; 2.) finding the "Integrated Development Concepts" (planning papers) of 10 model projects of the funding programme "Social City" and identification of health themes within them; 3.) search of the internet pages of the two most important institutions for health promotion after identifying documents indicating their cooperation with bodies of urban development (Hamburg Authority for Health and Consumer Protection; Hamburg Working Group for Health Promotion)., Results: Health aspects in areas with special needs have not been taken into consideration as much as the programmes would require. However, there are some positive examples. Current details of collaboration can be seen on the internet pages of the Hamburg Working Group for Health Promotion., Discussion and Conclusions: The (pilot) study has the problem that references to health in official documents can lead to both over- and under-estimations of the activities in reality. However, it could be shown that there are models of good practice which should be more widely used in order to reduce the gap between programmes and reality. Some recommendations for this purpose are presented for further discussion., Competing Interests: Die Autorinnen/Autoren geben an, dass kein Interessenkonflikt besteht., (Thieme. All rights reserved.)

Purpose: The paper aims (1) to identify and depict cartographically ambulatory care-sensitive conditions in Germany (based on data for the years 2006-2009) and (2) to discuss the implications., Method: The selection of ambulatory care-sensitive conditions (ACSC) was based on a literature review by Purdy et al. (2009) because a German catalogue of ACSC does not yet exist. Five of these indications were excluded due to limited data -access or a low number of cases. Additionally, 2 -diagnoses that are potentially relevant for Germany were included. Subsequently, diagnosis-specific hospitalisation rates were calculated for each of the 412 counties (Stadtkreise and Landkreise). The spatial distribution of 6 selected diag-noses (heart failure, diabetes, dehydration and gastroenteritis, ENT infections, influenza and pneumonia as well as schizophrenia) was depicted and discussed. Furthermore, an overall analysis of diagnoses analysis was performed., Results: Based on the overall analysis, counties with high hospitalisation rates were identified in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia as well as to a lesser degree in Brandenburg, Saarland, Rhineland Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia (for men and women). Low hospitalisation rates were often present in counties in Baden-Wuerttemberg. Based on the diagnosis-specific analysis, some regional clusters could be identified. Thus, high hospitalisa-tion rates for heart failure, diabetes, ENT infections were especially present in Eastern Germany. In contrast, there were no distribution patterns for high hospitalisation rates due to influenza and pneumonia. However, differences could be also identified between rural and urban regions: while hospitalisations due to dehydration and gastroenteritis were more often in rural -districts, hospitalisations due to schizophrenia occurred more frequently in urban regions., Conclusion: Knowledge of the spatial distribution of ACSC -rates serves as an important indicator for the identification of districts where health-care quality and access (structural--related) can be optimised. The analysis of hospitalisation rates for 6 selected indications showed that for some indications there were clear regional differences in the distribution of ACSCs in -Germany., (© Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York.)