PAVING THE WAY FOR EUROPE’S NEXT GENERATION OF HEALTH

September, 09, 2020

PAVING THE WAY FOR EUROPE’S NEXT GENERATION OF HEALTH

Committee for Sustainable and Healthy Lifestyles proposes the following innovative solutions:

Executive Summary

The Committee for Sustainable and Healthy Lifestyles believes that European policymakers have great potential to promote healthy and sustainable lifestyles widely across policies. Healthcare is only one of the contributing factors to our health. Factors such as food, air quality and mobility play a major role in the health and wellbeing of European citizens. To include health in more policies in a sustainable way, there is a need to promote more meaningful youth participation in EU health policymaking. This also requires an empowerment of European citizens, and especially its youth, to play a more active role in its own health.

Based on several expert consultations, a comprehensive literature review and a self-conducted survey of 114 young people from 35 countries in Europe, we advise European policy makers to implement novel, inclusive and future-oriented policies to:

› Build a health inclusive Europe.

• Deliver a Health in All Policies Approach.
• Adopt Sustainable Development Goal 3 in health policymaking.
• Adopt Health Impact Assessments (HIA) as standard.
• Strengthen Youth representation and participation in EU health policymaking.

› Create healthy and sustainable living environments and behaviours.

• Make healthy, sustainable food accessible, attractive and affordable for all. » Ensure green and sustainable living environments.
• Promote active and sustainable mobility and the measures needed to encourage and enable this.
• Ensure effective tobacco control measures.

› Empower citizens and young people to adopt a healthy and sustainable lifestyle.

Our 25 recommendations target specific policymakers and EU institutions and bodies, and include a citizen and patient-empowering message valuable at a global level.

You can find the full recommendation by clicking the image below: