The burden of chronic disease in Europe continues to grow. A major challenge facing national governments is how to tackle the risk factors of sedentary lifestyle, alcohol abuse, smoking, and unhealthy diet. These factors are complex and necessitate intersectoral collaboration to strengthen health promotion, counter-act the social determinants of health, and reduce the prevalence of chronic disease. European countries have diverse intersectoral collaboration to encourage health promotion activities. In the Joint Action CHRODIS-PLUS success factors for intersectoral collaboration within and outside healthcare which strengthen health promotion activities were identified with a mixed method design via a survey of 22 project partners in 14 countries and 2 workshops. In six semi-structured interviews, the mechanisms underlying these success factors were examined. These mechanisms can be very context-specific but do give more insight into how they can be replicated. In this paper, 20 health promotion interventions from national programs in CHRODIS PLUS are explored. This includes community interventions, policy actions, integrated approaches, capacity building, and training activities. The interventions involved collaboration across three to more than six sectors. The conclusion is a set of seven recommendations that are considered to be essential for fostering intersectoral collaboration to improve health-promoting activities.

Background: Health promotion and disease prevention programme registries (HPPRs), also called ‘best practice portals’, serve as entry points and practical repositories that provide decision-makers with easy access to (evidence-based) practices. However, there is limited knowledge of differences or overlaps of howe current national HPPRs in Europe function, the context and circumstances in which these HPPRs were developed, and the mechanisms utilised by each HPPR for the assessment, classification and quality improvement of the included practices. This study prepared an overview of different approaches in several national HPPRs and the EU Best Practice Portal (EU BPP) as well as identified commonalities and differences among the core characteristics of the HPPRs. Methods: We conducted a descriptive comparison – that focused on six European countries with existing or recently developed/implemented national HPPR and the EU BPP –to create a comparative overview. We used coding mechanisms to identify commonalities and differences; we performed data management, collection and building consensus during EuroHealthNet Thematic Working Group meetings. Results: All HPPRs offer a broad range of health promotion and disease-prevention practices and serve to support practitioners, policymakers and researchers in selecting practices. Almost all HPPRs have an assessment process in place or planned, requiring the application of assessment criteria that differ among the HPPRs. While all HPPRs collect and share recommendable practices, others have implemented further measures to improve the quality of the submitted practices. Different dissemination tools and strategies are employed to promote the use of the HPPRs, including social media, newsletters and publications as well as capacity building workshops for practice owners or technical options to connect citizens/patients with local practices. Conclusions: Collaboration between HPPRs (at national and EU level) is appreciated, especially regarding the use consistent terminology to avoid misinterpretation, facilitate cross-country comparison and enable discussions on the adaption of assessment criteria by national HPPRs. Greater efforts are needed to promote the actual implementation and transfer of practices at the national level to address public health challenges with proven and effective practices.

In the Netherlands six institutes representing prevention, health care and social welfare established an assessment system to evaluate the quality, effectiveness and feasibility of interventions. Together the institutes present in their portals 650 practices at three different assessment levels (well described, theoretically sound and effective). Ninety interventions are assessed as effective with only 15 interventions on the highest level (strong indications on effectiveness). In the assessment system the criteria for effectiveness have a strong focus on quantitative designs such as randomized-controlled trial, quasi -experimental and observational study designs. This favors ‘simple’ interventions and disadvantaged more complex intervention implemented in the domains of social welfare and health promotion. Not every intervention effect can be captured in a numerical outcome measure. To address this objection institutes decided to study the possibility to evaluate the effects of interventions also with qualitative research and to add criteria for qualitative research. To support the assessment of the validity and reliability of the qualitative evaluation studies a checklist for qualitative evaluation research and mixed methods was developed. With this checklist the external reviewer tests the extent to which methodological applications and analytical procedures have been followed. The result is a score of the validity/reliability of the relevant study to the effects of an intervention. This checklist supports the external reviewer in the decision for the effectiveness of an intervention. In this workshop we present this checklist for qualitative research and mixed methods, the addition of criteria in the assessment system of interventions and the first results of the pilot of the assessment of an intervention with a qualitative evaluation study.