The aim of the project is to develop a sustainable environmental health monitoring system comprising a set of sub-national indicators to improve public health across Europe and facilitate the comparability of health status and data.  In addition, the project aims to identify policies and interventions that deliver positive health outcomes and enable transferability to other regions throughout Europe.

The project will assess the applicability of the ENHIS indicators for environmental health policies and produce Europe’s first set of regional indicators which will be the basis of a harmonised system for the collation of environmental health information at a sub-national level and will complement the core set of 26 indicators. To ensure European added value for public health improvement, activities of this project will focus on: developing a harmonised system of environmental health indicators; collation of data; development of a method to compare regions; and collation of policies which deliver positive outcomes to ensure transferability within Europe.

The ENHIS indicators will be assessed for application at a regional level in participating European countries and any other environmental health information collected will be examined and where possible and practical, indicators will be developed to form a core set of sub-national indicators for Europe. Each indicator will be initially assessed by a set of criteria including geographical coverage, availability of data, level of disaggregation, frequency of update, format of data etc. Standardised methods for the collation of data for undeveloped ENHIS indicators will also be developed (where appropriate) using tools such as surveys. The policies/interventions which facilitate the delivery of positive outcomes will be collated and a compendium will be produced as a deliverable for the project. A standardised method for comparing regions in different European countries will be developed and this will enable appropriate successful policies and interventions in a region of one country to be transferred to another country.