On 4-5 November, the partners from the project “Solutions for Age-Friendly Employers - SAFE” gathered in Helsinki to advance the development of an age-friendly workplace self-assessment tool. Over two intensive days, the partners explored innovative age-management practices, with presentations from the Finnish start-up Nextmile and students at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. By the end of the workshop, the partners had crafted a preliminary set of indicators for assessing age-friendliness in workplaces.

As a non-clinical and non-pharmacological approach to mental healthcare, Arts on Prescription bridges two sectors: culture and health. Although there is growing interest in this field, a framework for setting up, coordinating, and incorporating this approach into existing healthcare systems and mental health care services is still lacking. Our Interreg BSR project “Arts on Prescription in the Baltic Sea Region” aims to bridge this gap and outlines the various benefits of Arts on Prescription in a recently published brochure.

Last week our attention was on the 74th session of the WHO Regional Committee for Europe. Health ministers and high-level delegates from the 53 Member States of the WHO European Region, as well as representatives of partner organizations including the NDPHS Secretariat, and regional non-State actors, met in Copenhagen.

In September, the MentalHealthMatters Transnational Community of Practice gathered for a workshop in Stockholm, hosted by the NDPHS Secretariat. The participants explored practices related to psychosocial work environments across the Baltic Sea Region. Promising practices from Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Norway, and Poland were presented and the goal was to examine how social innovations in this field have facilitated behavioural and organisational changes.

On September 25th, partners from the SAFE project financed by Interreg Central Baltic gathered at the NDPHS Secretariat office in Stockholm. The project is actively progressing and we have begun working on composing solutions for age-friendly organizations. This time we met in person to ensure a shared understanding of how to carry out the workshops and to gather input for the self-assessment tool.

Public health experts from Germany, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden and Ukraine recently came together for a workshop focused on exploring framework conditions for social innovation transfer. Organized by the NDPHS Secretariat, the “Transferability Workshop” aimed to identify successful public health interventions in the Baltic Sea region that could be adapted and implemented in other countries facing similar challenges.

To celebrate our network and project community and to showcase how cross-border and transnational work promote unity and progress, we join Interreg Cooperation Day 2024 with a week full of events. With the support from Interreg, we can make boundaries irrelevant in our daily lives and build inclusive communities with an aim to improve the health and well-being of all.