Promoting Healthy Eating and Physical Activity in Local Communities (HEPCOM)

In the EU, 20 percent of children and adolescents are overweight and of these one third are obese. HEPCOM is developing a European learning platform that assists local communities in their work for preventing obesity among children and young people.

A web learning platform, available in 13 languages, will be designed and tested with 40 local communities across EU to promote the use and upscaling of health promotion tools and mechanisms. Starting in February 2013, HEPCOM ran for three years, coordinated by CBO BV in the Netherlands.

The long-term objective of this European project is to contribute to preventing obesity among children and young people in the EU and to increase the number and quality of local community and school interventions for promoting healthy eating and physical activity among children and young people all over Europe.

Specific objectives of HEPCOM include:

To create a systematic overview of good practice tools from former and existing public health and other European projects
To ensure equal visibility for all public health and other European projects, being relevant for local communities and schools
To facilitate networking, dissemination and up-scaling of good practice results from public health and other European projects through a web-based learning platform
To raise awareness and create concrete and innovative interventions in 45 local communities around Europe
To disseminate project results and good practice throughout Europe
To ensure sustainability of the learning platform through the development of a sustainability document.

The final version of the HEPCOM learning platform was launched at national seminars in the countries where the pilot projects have taken place and at a concluding European conference. It is available for future use by stakeholders in local communities and coordinators of Public Health Programme and other relevant European projects.