The Netherlands National Public Health Conference

On April 8 and 9 the annual national conference on public health was held in Rotterdam. This year’s theme was ’building bridges’ in health promotion between research, policy and practice. I attended the first day of the conference. In the opening session the Inspector General Gerrit van der Wal, of the Netherlands Health Care Inspectorate, gave a presentation that clearly showed that the inspection takes health promotion seriously, which includes that health promotion and public health practice should strive towards evidence-based practice. The director of the municipal health service of Amsterdam held the second short keynote. He argued that he strongly prefers evidence-based practice in public health, but in lack of availability of evidence-based interventions for many problems that his organisation faces, he argued that he could not wait for the evidence, and thus relies on professional experience and creativity. This opening session, as well as a debate session at the end of the day that I participated in, focussed, I believe, too much on the gap between science and practice in health promotion, in stead of the bridges that have been build in recent years. One strong example of bridges that are under construction are the so-called academic workplaces , or academic collaborative centers for public health in which public health academic research works closely together with practice organisations such as municipal health services, primary care organisations, or occupational health services, to plan and conduct research based on problems that these practice organisations face, to combine practice innovation with evaluation research, and to implement outcomes of scientific research in public health practice.
In another session during the day I gave a short introductory presentation in a workshop on the basic values and goals of public health practice: should we aim for health promotion as our most important goals, is it autonomy in making healthful or unhealthy choices that we should strive for, or is it social justice that public health practice should help to realise?