Annual health promotion summer course ’Strategies for health in Europe’

Health promotion is based on intersectoral, interdisciplinary and international professional collaboration, community participation, empowerment, equity and freedom. These principles need to be fostered through training strategies and actions, including international courses. Courses should be planned as full time experiences, in which social life plays an important role facilitating mutual exchange and enabling participants to experiment in different contexts, with the richness and the challenges of international collaboration. In particular courses are expected: to involve in common training, both as teachers and as participants, the widest range of professionals ; to create wide spaces for mutual exchange, with equal interaction among professionals and flexibility between teaching and learning roles ; to recognize and promote among participants diversity and freedom towards the training proposals. The European Training Consortium in Public Health and Health Promotion (ETC-PHHP) is run by 10 schools of public health from different countries: Goteborg, Valencia, Liverpool and Zagreb (from 1990), Prague (1994), Cagliari and Wageningen (1995), Dusseldorf (2001) and Perugia and Bergen (2006). Since 1991, ETC-PHHP organized 15 summer courses in nine cities (the last four in collaboration with the European Master in Health Promotion (EUMAHP), with more than 350 participants from 33 European and nine Non-European countries. Presented will be the salutogenetic-oriented curriculum of the summer course that focuses on European Strategies for Health, which refers to current health promotion and public health subjects. This year’s topic was: ‘Reducing Health Inequalities: Evidence for Community Action’. The 16th ETC-PHHP Summer Course was held with 30 participants from 16 countries as a Dutch-German joint project in Wageningen und Dusseldorf in July 2007.