Purpose: PEN is a multi-disciplinary research network within the Joint Programming Initiative on a Healthy Diet for a Healthy Life (JPI HDHL). Its vision is to provide Europe with tools to identify, evaluate and benchmark public policies designed to directly or indirectly address physical activity (PA), unhealthy diets and sedentary behaviour while also accounting for health inequalities.

Methods: In consultation with policymakers and experts in policy development, implementation and evaluation, PEN has undertaken to (1) assess policy potential for influencing food and PA environments, (2) foster a pan-European monitoring and surveillance system, (3) model policy impact at the population level, (4) evaluate policy implementation processes, and (5) provide recommendations to ensure that equity and diversity perspectives are reflected in policies across Europe.

Results: PEN has concluded its third year and despite COVID-19 impediments, significant work has been achieved, including:

• Publication of the EU Healthy Food Environment Policy Index (Food-EPI) 

• Publication of a 4-country comparison of PA policy.

• Development of an open access searchable catalogue of existing monitoring and surveillance datasets (see: www.jpi-pen.eu).

• Development of a shared terminology (PEN glossary).

• Established the PEN Early Career Network.

• Enhanced collaboration with the CO-CREATE, STOP and Best-ReMaP projects. This will maximise the impact of each project through joint work.  

Conclusion: PEN aims to (1) adapt and implement a Food-EPI and develop a Physical Activity Environment Policy Index (PA-EPI) in selected European countries, (2) map health and health behaviour indicators needed to evaluate the outcome of policy interventions to the data already provided by existing surveillance/ monitoring systems and establish an expert platform to further develop these systems, (3) review, critically assess and refine quantitative methods for the evaluation of the impact of public policies,  identify key factors, barriers and facilitators of effective policy interventions and to provide tools to assess the successful implementation of policies, (4) summarise the requirements for policy interventions to reach vulnerable groups, including lower socio-economic groups and ethnic minority populations, and (5) provide an in-depth assessment of policy impact and implementation.

Background: Governmental policy and infrastructure support have the opportunity to improve food environments by implementing effective policies. The aim of the current study was to compare the extent of policy implementation to create healthy food environments by national governments across five European countries and by the European Union. 

Methods: The Healthy Food Environment Policy Index (Food-EPI) aims to assess the extent of implementation of recommended food environment policies by governments compared with international best practices and prioritize actions to fill implementation gaps. The Food-EPI was applied in Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Poland, and the European Union. Expert panels (n=17-37) benchmarked the extent of implementation of 47 policy and infrastructure support good practice indicators by their government against best practices, using an evidence document verified by government officials. In addition, experts identified and prioritized actions to address implementation gaps. The proportion of indicators at “very low if any,” “low,” “medium,” and “high” implementation, overall Food-EPI scores, priority action and top 5 recommendations were compared across countries and the EU.  

Results: Norway (63%) had the highest rating of implementation on overall policy domain indicators whereas Germany (33%) and the Netherlands (34%) had the lowest rating of implementation compared to the other countries. However, all countries scored better on the implementation of infrastructure support than on the implementation of policies to create health-promoting capacity of food environments. Also in the EU, infrastructure support was evaluated of more strength than its direct policies improving food environments. Top 5 actions in all countries included recommendations with respect to food prices (e.g. taxation unhealthy foods) or food-provision (e.g. healthy food supply in public settings).   

Conclusion: Most countries had predominantly ‘low’ to ‘very low’ implementation scores for policies which directly shape food environments. The results show that there is a need of a comprehensive policy package covering multiple areas to improve food environments and public health nutrition and prevent obesity and diet-related non-communicable diseases.   

Background: Evidence suggests that research into policy effectiveness lags research that links physical activity to health, or that evaluates physical activity programme efficacy. To the best available knowledge, no project has linked existing physical activity policy statements with research that corroborates or discredits the effectiveness of these statements.

Purpose: To develop a Physical Activity Environment Policy Index (PA-EPI) with a view to assess a government’s level of implementation of policies and infrastructure support against a set of good practice statements (GPS) or benchmarks.

Methods: Four stages included i) synthesizing evidence from several systematic literature reviews, ii) a grey literature review of major national or supranational grey literature, and consultation with both iii) academic and iv) policy experts with a remit for the promotion of PA. These data were used to provide an understanding of best evidence and international practices in PA policy, and based on the Food-EPI developed by INFORMAS, led to the development of the PA-EPI. 

Results: The PA-EPI tool consists of two components, fifteen domains and fifty-two good practice indicators.  The two components are the PA policies themselves and their Infrastructure Support.  There are eight PA policy domains aligned with ISPAH’s eight investments that work for PA, and seven infrastructure domains including leadership, funding and resources, monitoring and intelligence.  The good practice indicators were deemed important for improving population levels of PA, feasible to implement in practice and easy to assess impact by international academics and by national level policymakers across four EU countries.   

Conclusions: The PA-EPI tool allows for assessment of the extent of implementation of national government policies and actions, for creating healthy physical activity policy environments against international best practice.  It is useful for identifying the major implementation gaps and prioritize actions needed to address critical gaps in government policies and infrastructure support for implementation.

Keywords: Benchmarking; Good Practice Statements; Policy Evaluation Network; Physical Activity; Policy