Prevention Platform
Authors: Van Pelt Patricia 
Published: January 2024

A brand new prevention platform calls for decisive investment in prevention.

It is unique because the platform acts across policy domains, as well as policy levels and language borders.

The platform aims to promote health for all, contributing to more quality of life and healthy life years. We aim at a transformation from curative care (curative) to ensuring that people are born healthy and stay healthy (preventive).

This fits seamlessly with the goal of integrated care: enabling people to maintain or regain their independence and improve their quality of life. Prevention and self-care are as essential to achieving this goal as the coordination of health and social care services.

With prevention support, people should be able to make informed decisions about their care and well-being; develop skills and knowledge to self-manage their long-term conditions; remain active in their communities and not become socially isolated.

Prevention, especially primary prevention, is the basis of the new, integrated health and well-being policies we are pursuing. This requires many initiators from the health and welfare sector, as well as schools, businesses, social services, sports clubs to pull on the same sea.

Driven by the Health in All Policies idea, the prevention platform groups together everyone - institutions and individuals - who want to give priority to prevention, to join forces to this end (to 'unbundle').

The prevention platform focuses on the question of how to make prevention structurally permeate all sections of society.

Structural attention and a long-term strategy for prevention are the message here.

Major investments in better prevention and health promotion within a strengthened primary care system as well as in an integrated social, welfare and healthcare concept: from ""taking care of sick people" to "making sure people are born healthy and stay healthy".

We are working on a Community. There is a common concern to work preventively, health and wellness-wise, from very different, missions and experiences. There is no common language around prevention. By working together, talking together and setting concrete goals, prevention will have richer content.

 

First achievement of the platform during the corona crisis was the call to the GEMS "Create a healthier living environment and make a healthy lifestyle a basic rule".

The great interest in the platform compelled us to draft a charter.

Round table discussions were organised across Flanders for the charter's signatories. This gets the conversation going across domains and levels.

The charter has so far been signed by 820 organisations, academics or citizens.

Major organisations such as VVSG, Domus Medica, Zorgnet Icuro, VRP, VAD, ... put their backs into it.

At the launch conference of the platform, ministers from the federal and Flemish levels were present together.

The Prevention Platform is taken up as an important stakeholder in various consultative forums, as an independent advocacy platform, striving for transformation.

The platform aims for an Interfederal plan for Belgium: Bringing together the prevention & health promotion sector (regional level) and the curative sector (national level) to work together on government-wide policies for Health for All.