Life&health, health promoting communities Erasmus Project

Project Title

Life&health, health promoting communities

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for adult education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Civic engagement / responsible citizenship; Social entrepreneurship / social innovation; Health and wellbeing

Project Summary

Promoting adult learning is a key objective of the EU, especially towards Europe’s aging workforce to become more active and productive. Integrating health literacy and lifestyle changes into lifelong learning is as crucial as adult literacy in general. Lifestyle training is a vital part in keeping the European workforce active and productive and to involve adults in education that directly affects their life and well-being. Life&health focused on health promotion and lifestyle coaching towards adults. The objective is to raise awareness of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) their risk factors related to lifestyle, increase health literacy and empowered people to take action to improve their health and communities to create environment supporting health. Target groups are communities in Europe that want to include and promote Life&health lifestyle coaching as preventive measure against NCDs towards adult population. Other stakeholders are National health authorities and Directorate of Health, local Health clinics, Lifelong learning centers wanting to provide lifestyle coaching and professionals wanting to engage and set up lifestyle coaching. The project created open educational resources (OER) for lifestyle coaching, analyzed and disseminated best practices and integrated lifestyle training into adult education and lifelong learning system. The constantly increasing epidemic of NCDs calls for actions and interdisciplinary cooperation between organizations involved in the health and adult education system.

The ultimate outcome that Life&Health project aimed to achieve is enhancement and strengthening of community public health by creating and piloting lifestyle coaching methods and tools, training materials and establishing lifestyle coaches’ network and Learning platforms. The Life&Health project will add value to existing structures for public health which will subsequently result in lifestyle coaching and increased public awareness of key risk factors of health. Project outcomes can be found in the description of Life&Health intellectual outputs (IOs) and multiplier events (MEs) below, which are, as follows:

Intellectual outputs:
IO1: Competency Gap Analysis: Defined available structures, best practices, funding and organizations involved in health promotion and/or primary prevention. Defined needs, objectives and target groups and select community(ies) and community groups for participation.
IO2: Transferred best practices and open educational resources (OER) from the “SÍBS Life and Health” initiative, adjusted to participating communities; translation, adaptation and localization of OER. Implemented free health check, parallel to “Your Life & Health day” using HAL-100™survey tool adapted and translated to partners languages.
IO3: “Life and health” on-line learning platforms in partner languages, disseminating and transferring project results, including: curriculum for lifestyle coaching, online teaching material for lifestyle coaching in partner languages, training of lifestyle coaches, teaching and training material and finally Network of lifestyle coaches in partner countries/regions.
IO4: Pilot lifestyle training by trained lifestyle coaches in participating regions/countries & Pilot training or workshop of lifestyle coaches in participating regions.

Multiplier Events: All partners organised 1-4 multiplier event, that is “Your life and health day” including a free health check upon completion of IO. A final conference was organized online due to the Covid situtation by SíBS with the added value of creating content that can be accessed on project and partners websites at any time, promoting project results to local stakeholders, decision and policy makers.

The Life&Health partnership and project outcomes triggered wider discussions for improving the situation NCDs and resulted in Iceland in implementation of the Life&Health course in several community and adult education centers around the country and in Norway the lifestyle training course is being implemented both face to face and online within LHL health care centers in different communities in Norway.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 278730 Eur

Project Coordinator

Samband íslenskra berkla- og brjóstholssjúklinga & Country: IS

Project Partners

• LHL- Norwegian Heart and Lung Patient Organisation
• Austurbrú
• CESIE