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Background: Community-based initiatives (CBIs) on childhood obesity are considered a good practice approach against childhood obesity. The European Commission called for an overview of CBIs implemented from 2005-2011. A survey was executed by the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment of the Netherlands, in collaboration with the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the European CBIs, as identified in the survey, presenting their general characteristics, applied strategies (separately for actions targeting the environment and/or directly the children's behaviour) and the reported effects on weight indicators.Methods: Potentially eligible CBIs were identified by informants in 27 European Union countries, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland, and through desk research. School based approaches could be included if they complied with criteria related to being 'community-based'. In total, 278 potential eligible CBIs were identified and of these, 260 projects were approached. For 88 an electronic questionnaire was completed; of these 71 met all criteria. The included projects were reported by 15 countries.Results: 66% of the 71 CBIs implemented actions in more than one setting or throughout the neighbourhood. Most frequently reported environmental actions were professional training (78%), actions for parents (70%), and changing the social (62%) and physical (52%) environment. Most frequently reported educational activities were group education (92%), general educational information (90%), and counselling sessions (58%). The vast majority (96%) implemented both environmental and individual strategies and about half of the CBIs reported a public-private partnership. Eight CBIs provided evidence supporting positive effects on weight indicators and/or overweight prevalence in a general population of children (aged 6 to 12 yrs), and one CBI did not support this. Two of those CBIs were also conducted among adolescents (aged 12 to 16,5 yrs), but showed no effect in this age-group.Conclusions: Despite diversity of included CBIs, common characteristics were the application of integrated actions at a local level, aimed at changing the environment and the children's behaviour directly. Evidence supporting effectiveness on weight indicators is available, although the design and conduct of most of these studies were suboptimal (i.e. no control group, a small sample size, not random). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The European Commission, together with the European Union (EU) Member States, developed a core set of indicators for monitoring public health in the EU, the European Core Health Indicators (ECHI) shortlist. From 2009 to 2012 developmental work on the ECHI indicators continued within the framework of the Joint Action for European Community Health Indicators and Monitoring (ECHIM). In this article, we give the current state of affairs on the availability of data for the ECHI indicators in the Netherlands and show what progress has been made over the past 5 years. The information provided serves as an illustration of the challenges encountered in a European country when working on harmonising national data collections with international data delivery requirements., Methods: To assess data availability, we consulted Dutch data experts and relevant websites and reports on health monitoring activities. We compared the available Dutch data with the definitions, preferred data sources and relevant dimensions as requested by ECHI., Results: The Netherlands can provide data for 66 of the 75 ECHI indicators for which availability could be assessed: for all of the 48 ECHI indicators that can be extracted from international databases and for 18 of the 27 indicators not available from international databases. Breakdowns by socio-economic status and region are not possible for 23 (35%) of the total of 66 indicators for which data are available and for 21 (32%) of these 66 indicators the definition is not exactly the same as requested by ECHIM. Since 2009, better estimates have become available for low birth weight, practising physicians and practising nurses. Moreover, several European initiatives to improve harmonised data collection are expected to have a positive effect on data availability for the Netherlands. Such initiatives should become sustainable in order to provide possibilities for monitoring trends. The scattered data ownership in the Netherlands complicates the coordination work for international data deliveries., Conclusion: Data availability in the Netherlands is good. Since 2009, several Dutch and European developments in harmonising data collection have contributed or will significantly contribute to improvements in the data situation for the ECHI indicators in the Netherlands.

Background: Public health policies aim to improve and maintain the health of citizens. Relevant data and indicators are needed for a health policy that is based on factual information. After 14 years of work (1998-2012), the multi-phase action on European Community Health Indicators (ECHI) has created a health monitoring and reporting system. It has generated EU added value by defining the ECHI shortlist with 88 common and comparable key health indicators for Europe., Methods: In the 2009-2012 Joint Action for ECHIM project the ECHI shortlist was updated through consultation with Member State representatives. Guidelines for implementation of the ECHI Indicators at national level were developed and a pilot data collection was carried out., Results: 67 of the ECHI Indicators are already part of regular international data collections and thus available for a majority of Member States, 14 are close to ready and 13 still need development work. By mid-2012 half of the countries have incorporated ECHI indicators in their national health information systems and the process is ongoing in the majority of the countries. Twenty-five countries were able to provide data in a Pilot Data Collection for 20 ECHI Indicators that were not yet (fully) available in the international databases., Conclusions: The EU needs a permanent health monitoring and reporting system. The Joint Action for ECHIM has set an example for the implementation of a system that can develop and maintain the ECHI indicators,, and promote and encourage the use of ECHI in health reporting and health policy making. The aim for sustainable public health monitoring is also supported by a Eurostat regulation on public health statistics requiring that health statistics shall be provided according to the ECHI methodology. Further efforts at DG SANCO and Eurostat are needed towards a permanent health monitoring system.