President
Dr Auke Wiegersma
Department of Social Medicine
University Groningen
A.Deusinglaan 1
9713 AV Groningen
The Netherlands
tel.: +31 50 3636850[
fax: +31 50 363625
email: p.a.wiegersma@med.umcg.nl

In December 2001 the Governing Council of the EUPHA gave its approval to the founding of the Section Child and Adolescent Public Health. The section currently has 290 members. At the Montreux conference, the section organised a workshop on “How to use the European strategy for child and adolescent health and development “ as well as an annual meeting. The president co-chaired two parallel sessions on Child and adolescent lifestyle programmes and on Children at Risk. The day before the conference, a pre conference meeting was organised on “R U Effective? Meeting the health needs of young people”.

Aim of the Section
The aim of the Section, therefore, is to bring together the actors in influencing health in its broadest sense, especially those that work with the younger age groups - (youth) welfare workers, psychologists, educational scientists, (youth) health care professionals, but also paediatricians, psychiatrists and the like. Together they should increase the knowledge base on effective ways to positively influence health using collective approaches and irrespective of 'finding place', thus expressly including those youngsters that dropped out, skipped education, already have jobs or are otherwise not to be reached via institutions for primary, secondary or tertiary education. Studies are to be initiated on an international level to compare different techniques and interventions aimed at improving health, thus promoting evidence-based community medicine.

Furthermore, an effort will be made to standardise survey techniques throughout Europe in order to be able to compare and monitor the health status of the young in the various countries and measure possible health improvement due to preventive interventions embedded in the international comparative studies to be started.

In short, for the 0 - 24 year age group, this Section is to:

-	bring together the various professionals engaged in furthering mental and physical health, reduce health inequalities and promote healthy lifestyles to promote the interdisciplinary exchange of relevant information and expertise;
-	increase the knowledge base regarding effective, evidence-based ways to influence health in its broadest sense;
-	initiate and give guidance to international studies comparing different techniques and interventions aimed at improving health;
-	initiate and further the use of standardised survey techniques for monitoring health;
-	at the annual EUPHA conferences and elsewhere, encourage presentation (and publication) of examples of above mentioned activities and techniques;
-	at the annual EUPHA conferences and elsewhere encourage presentation and publication of results of (international comparative) research into influencing health;
-	at each EUPHA conference, arrange workshops on standardisation and comparative study techniques.

Background information
The first idea originates from our former EUPHA president Marc Brodin. During the council meeting he pointed out that on a European scale, there is relatively very little known about health, health-related behaviour and relevant preventive interventions for youth in the 4 - 12 year age bracket. This seems to be caused by the fact that pertinent information about this age group can often only be obtained via their parents, making data harder to obtain and less reliable than for instance letting children complete surveys in the classroom. Nevertheless, theory suggests that at this age and earlier, the foundation is laid for later health-related and health-compromising behaviour, making it all-important to focus preventive efforts on this younger age group. Personally, I think prevention should start at the age of minus 9 months.

However, for this it is vital to obtain information about the way these children can be positively influenced, given information in a way that is easily understood and even internalised and what preventive interventions could be successful. In this, commerce is 'light-years' ahead of us when it comes to understanding - and exploiting this understanding of - the child's mind. Much can be learned from them, for instance in the use of focus groups, analysing the way children speak about certain subjects and translating that in new approaches to entice them into buying their products, et cetera. These techniques, and many others from other, often unexpected sources can certainly be used by youth health care as well and one of the tasks of the Section would be to identify promising approaches and translating them into successful public health interventions.

A second example comes from the pioneering work of Aidan Macfarlane, who was our keynote speaker at the workshop in Dresden in 2002. He has managed to create a website, that has grown into a national interactive online vade mecum for children, parents and teachers alike, with more than 230.000 hits a week. Not only that, but by collating the data from the questions asked he can foresee trends, and identify areas of interest or concern for public health that otherwise would go unnoticed.