The general objective of the InForm project is to develop integrated overweight / obesity prevention and treatment strategies for children and adolescents. Implemented beyond project time in the participating countries, these will contribute to combating the childhood obesity epidemic in Europe.
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The long term aim is to contribute to preventing overweight and obesity among children and young people in the EU. It is widely acknowledged to engage local communities in a more structured way in order for them to be more active and competent in this area. Therefore it is important to raise awareness and provide easy access to good practice on promoting healthy eating and physical activity interventions. This will assist local communities and schools to apply more strategic approaches and use innovative tools and whole community approaches which are already available. The overall objective is to increase the quality and level of local community and school interventions all over Europe on promoting healthy eating and physical activity among children and young people, by up scaling good practice and results from previous and current PHP and other European projects, based on networking and dissemination, through the development of a sustainable European web based learning platform.
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The general objective of this collaborative project (EPIC PANACEA) is to identify and describe the determinants of weight and weight changes and to develop specific recommendations and guidelines for the prevention of Obesity in Europe.
The specific objectives of the EPIC PANACEA project are to:
1) Describe cross-sectionaly, for men and women, in three age groups, for (Northern, Central, and Southern) European regions, the association between current weight and:
a) Physical Activity
b) Nutritional habits
c) Cessation of Smoking
d) Alcohol drinking and
e) Meals eating out of home.
2) Study, using follow-up data, the determinants of stable weight and weight changes in relation to all of the above;
3) Study the interrelations between the determinants of obesity and assess the quantitative contribution of each of them specifically.

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Strengthening voluntary cooperation between Member States to improve the health of EU citizens

Malta will be holding the Presidency of the EU Council between January and June 2017. As part of this Presidency, Malta will be focusing upon voluntary cooperation between member states in two main areas, which are Structured Cooperation between Health Systems as a mechanism to improve access to innovative and highly specialised services, medicines and technologies and halting the rise of childhood obesity. The general objective of this proposal is the convening of two high level technical workshops bringing together experts from Member States to discuss the identified thematic priorities. These discussions will form two outcome reports that may be used as a basis for the elaboration of Council Conclusions.
The Maltese EU Presidency in 2017 will explore the scope of voluntary structured cooperation between Member States, to ensure access to innovative medical technologies as well as provision of highly specialised health services. Political focus will be on the needs of small populations. Two specific areas where sustainable models of structured cooperation could be of particular relevance for small populations are health workforce and medical technology. The scope of cooperation in these fields both between individual Member States as well as within the context of the EU will be further explored in two policy briefs being drawn up as part of this initiative.
Tackling childhood obesity will be of EU added value across all MS. Malta has prioritised childhood obesity as one of its thematic priority areas. It is planned to take actions in this area by bringing together technical people and experts from member states working in this area at a technical workshop. To this aim two policy briefs will be developed dealing with identifying evidence-based interventions across Europe to tackle childhood obesity and to develop guidelines for the procurement of school meals.
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For screening, the purpose is to create guidance based on the best available evidence and in accordance with current & new European quality assurance guidelines for cancer screening. It is becoming clear that in many areas of medicine, integration of services is essential in order to achieve optimal results using the available resources rationally. We will focus on the latter approach: how to move from the concept of a Comprehensive Cancer Center to a Comprehensive Cancer Care Network. A new challenge for health care policy is the shift from “how long” people live after diagnosis to “how well” people live from diagnosis onward; a European organizational framework will be developed to include a detailed list of recommendations to be tackled to address survivorship, rehabilitation & palliative care. In community-level care, improved community cancer care of populations through early cancer detection & provision of cancer pathways in primary care will be sought. These activities will be supplemented by discussion of MS on key cancer control topics in a platform for MS cooperation.
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