Meeting: 'Prevention systems: how to transform evidence into practice'

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The final minutes from this meeting are available here in our document library.

Interventions in the area of prevention are supported by a growing evidence base, and quality standards have been published both for the European and the broader international context. Translating the evidence into prevention policy and from there into practice, however, remains a major challenge.

Important factors can be identified:

• how prevention policies are delivered in organisational terms;
• how prevention is funded;
• whether quality criteria are linked to funding;
• whether the different policy sectors (education, health, youth, criminal justice) cooperate effectively;
• whether research centres are involved in evaluation and development;
• how much policymakers and professionals know about effective principles;
• whether effective programmes are available.

Experts from 11 EU Member States met at the EMCDDA headquarters to discuss and identify those key components and innovations that might be essential for creating better prevention systems.

More concretely, the objectives of meeting were to:

• discuss the different experiences in European countries and regions of responding to these challenges under different administrative and cultural conditions;
• agree on a set of variables (or dimensions) by which prevention systems could be characterised (for example for the prevention profiles);
• describe the key ingredients needed to build prevention systems that cover all domains of behavioural influence, from environmental to indicated prevention. The result would be hosted on the EMCDDA website.