Strengthening public health professionals in implementing prevention: building a learning community

In the past decades, Dutch health care policy has not succeeded in flattening increase in care demand and associated costs, nor in reducing the gap in healthy life expectancy between people lesser or better off. As a result, the Dutch government recently launched policies to stimulate high-quality, accessible and affordable healthcare for the future and to stimulate healthy and active living. At the heart of these policies is the implementation of integrated and cross-domain preventive approaches between primary care, the public health sector and the social domain, such as fall prevention among older people, lifestyle approaches combatting overweight in adults and children, and promoting wellbeing among people with psychosocial problems. Local governments and health insurers are held responsible for the performance of these preventive approaches, which require challenging alignment and fine tuning across local policy makers, care and service providers, and public health (PH) professionals. Building a learning community: To optimally advise local governments, PH professionals need knowledge and skills on how to implement cross-domain preventive approaches successfully on a local level. Therefore, a learning community for PH professionals is initiated, financed by the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. PH professionals of all public health services in the Netherlands participate. Experts from knowledge institutes, intervention designers and PH professionals contribute to the learning community. Evaluative research is carried out to get more insight into conditions and prerequisites for a more sustainable learning community. Furthermore, lessons learned will be applied as input for determining the conditions for realising a solid, national knowledge infrastructure around integrated and cross-domain preventive approaches. KEY MESSAGES: • To optimally advise local governments, public health professionals need knowledge and skills on how to implement cross-domain preventive approaches successfully on a local level. • Lessons learned from working with a learning community serve as input for determining the conditions required for realising a knowledge infrastructure around integrated preventive approaches.