Canada-Europe Initiative in Health Promotion and Advanced Learning (CEIHPAL)

With co-funding for three years (2005-2008) from the European Commission (Educational Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency) and by the Ministry of Human Resources and Skills Development (HRSD) in Canada, this project facilitated institutional, student and faculty cooperation.

The overarching goals of the CEIHPAL programme were to create opportunities for effective student exchanges in the area of health promotion learning, and to collaboratively develop joint learning resources which would contribute to the development of the core curriculum in international health promotion.

The project aimed to catalyse transatlantic collaboration among universities in two major established academic coalitions. From the European side this was based on the European Masters in Health Promotion Programme Consortium (EUMAHP) of 15 universities, represented by Magdeburg-Stendhal University of Applied Sciences (Germany), the University of Brighton (England), and the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece). From the Canadian side the relevant network was the Canadian Consortium for Health Promotion Education and Research comprising 15 Canadian higher education institutions, represented by the University of Victoria (British Colombia), the University of Alberta (Alberta), and the University of Toronto (Ontario).

The project partners established collaboratively the following key objectives for the duration of the programme:

> To establish foundations for sustainable collaboration between key institutions and academics in health promotion;
> To develop an international core health promotion curriculum by establishing a set of sustainable common learning objectives and resources;
> To support opportunities for the exchange of 54 advanced (postgraduate) students;
> To enhance capacity for faculty exchange and virtual learning; and
> To evaluate effectively and disseminate knowledge gained throughout the course of the project.


The CEIHPAL project was a unique and innovative project that fostered advanced intercontinental education and learning in health promotion from 2005–2009.

The project facilitated institutional, student and faculty cooperation, by developing a high level of international communication. Student mobility was a central part of project activities with a total of 49 health promotion students exchanging between Canada and Europe.

This mobility led to a number of important learning outcomes relating to (among other things), student experiences of transatlantic mobility, benefits of transatlantic exchanges; and project challenges for student mobility (see Sherriff et al., 2012). In addition, a series of core modules were created towards the development of an International Masters and PhD/Professional Doctorate Programme in Health Promotion providing the foundations upon which the TEP (hyperlink to TEP) project (2009-2011) was later built.