Project summary

Title: Community Health Management to Enhance Behaviour
Acronym: CHANCE
Duration: 2 years
Contents:
In most European countries, health and welfare are unequally distributed. At the same time, knowledge about good health behaviour has never been better. One problem is that official health messages (including food information), if they exist in a state, do only hardly reach people in their normal course of life. Especially those who are deprived have a lack of information and have an unhealthy lifestyle. A healthy lifestyle, the way it is defined in the project CHANCE, means at first adequate physical activity, good nutrition, moving and housing. But secondly, it also refers to the social resources of a local community which promotes a healthy lifestyle.

The consortium will consist of 10 partners from 6 countries. The project is based on the hypothesis that the local community in which one lives influences the knowledge about a healthy lifestyle and its implementation ineveryday life. Both can be facilitated and enhanced by means of community health management.

On the European level, the aims are: 

• Development of a local community-related analysis instrument and testing of its capability by applying it in different European countries and cultures to determine the resources of a local community, the perception of health messages, the people’s attitude tohealth, and the specific requirement of interventions of health information
• Implementation and evaluation of several methods for health education and consumer education tailored to thespecific needs of the local community
• The potentials of a Community Health Management will be tested, compared and promoted, paying attention to the cultural characteristics.