GEP Project (2004 - 2005)

Background:

GEP - Getting Evidence into Practice- was a project co-funded by the European Commission which took place from 1 February 2004 to 31 July 2005. The aim of the project was to exchange knowledge in the field of evidence building for health promotion and disease prevention. The final goal was to develop a European Consensus on standards and procedures to gather evidence on what works, and how to best implement this in practice.

The GEP project was coordinated by NIGZ, the Netherlands Institute for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention with the active contribution of EuroHealthNet, VIGeZ, KTL and IUHPE. Also, 16 national health institutes in 13 countries participated in the project.

Aims & Objectives:

The overall aim of the project was to broaden the evidence base and strengthen collaboration among the key stakeholders (agencies, practitioners and researchers) in the form of a European consortium for evidence based health promotion.

Haven taken these strategic aims as a starting points, a number of operational objectives were derived for the different stages of the project.

Strand one:

to develop a consensus-based protocol on how to select and analyse documents, literature and expertise from research, practice and policies and on how to assess and summarize evidence
to carry out a feasibility test for the protocol.

Strand two:

an inventory of existing assessment protocols to increase quality of planning and implementation of health promotion projects
reaching a consensus on an assessment protocol and a set of guidelines to increase quality of planning and implementation of health promotion projects to be used by health promotion professionals in the EU members states
pilot testing the consensus-based assessment tool (EQUIHP) and quality guidelines adn develop a user manual.

Strand three:

stimulated a process of peer input on a newly accessible body of knowledge being published to improve the effectiveness of health promotion and practice.

This strand of the project examined four subject areas:

tobacco
mental health
health promotion infrastructures
getting evidence into practice (including capacity building aspects).

Activities:

The main outcomes of the project were:

a consensus review protocol for finding, collecting, defining and describing evidence
a European quality instrument for health promotion (EQUIHP) to assess and improve health promotion
update of the evidence on two selected topics and on the current position of evidence regarding effective health promotion

For more information, please visit the project website.