With this flagship initiative, WHO/Europe intends to invest in new insights that can help to build a culture of health in which everyone is enabled to make healthy choices, in their daily lives and in the way they use health services. People’s behaviours can be adversely affected by factors often insufficiently taken into account in the design and implementation of policies, the organization of services or the behaviour of health workers: these can range from a lack of health literacy, conflicting belief systems, feelings of fear, mistrust, and uncertainty, mis-processed information, feelings of inconvenience or an experience of disrespect or discrimination. Often these barriers to optimal health can be avoided or corrected by building a better understanding of these social, behavioural and cultural factors.

The initiative will promote the use of insights into these social, behavioural and cultural factors to improve health literacy, as well as the design, procedures and provider behaviour at the interface between citizens and their health and social care services.  It will foster new scientific understanding on how these factors and the design of policies and service delivery processes interact to assist countries in optimizing uptake of services, adherence to treatment, self-care, and individual and collective ways of living (including in view of the social adaptations required in response to the COVID-19 crisis). By engaging disciplines beyond the bio-medical sphere, including the social sciences  and the medical humanities, this initiative will help health authorities improve the way their services respond to their citizens’ expectations for respectful and people-centred care.

This flagship initiative will:

• support interested countries, as well as regional and subregional structures, to identify opportunities to adapt, adopt and create good practices in promoting  a culture of health and optimizing the design of processes and practice at the interface between people and their health and social care services;
• produce a compendium of good practices for making policies, processes, procedures, and regulations more culture appropriate, people centred and user friendly, with particular focus on the inclusion of information on patient experience in policy formation;
• establish a resource centre for the emerging research on behavioural and cultural factors that affect behaviour regarding health; and
• produce an investment case for developing a knowledge and evidence base  in this area of work.