What if we could redesign the way we think about health?
Health is shaped every day by where we live, what we eat, the air we breathe, the places where we work and learn, and the opportunities we have throughout life. Creating a healthier society therefore requires more than isolated interventions. It calls for systemic change across the environments, policies, and institutions that shape our health every day.
That is exactly what the EWUU institute for Preventive Health is working towards.
At the EWUU institute for Preventive Health, we believe that creating a healthier future is a shared responsibility. Together with researchers, policymakers, healthcare professionals, businesses, and citizens, we are working to accelerate the transition towards a healthier Netherlands. Our ambition contributes to the national mission of helping people live five more healthy years while reducing health inequalities by 30%.
Four pathways, one shared ambition
Every major transition starts with imagining a different future.
Our four Preventive Health Transition Pathways are designed to support that process. Grounded in scientific evidence, policy analysis, stakeholder interviews, and input from citizens and experts, the pathways provide different perspectives for systemic change.
Together, the pathways challenge us to look beyond today’s systems and imagine how health could become a guiding principle for the way we design our communities, shape our policies, and organise society.
1. Making Preventive Health with All, for All
Health becomes a shared responsibility, with citizens, governments, researchers, and organisations co-creating healthier communities and reducing health inequalities together.
2. Making Preventive Health the Easy Choice
Healthy living becomes the natural choice by redesigning our environments, from food and mobility to public spaces and digital platforms, to make healthy behaviour easier and more accessible.
3. Making Preventive Health Planetary-Centred
Human health and planetary health are treated as inseparable, embedding climate, biodiversity, and environmental sustainability into preventive health policies and everyday decision-making.
4. Making Preventive Health Investable
Prevention is recognised as one of society’s smartest long-term investments, with funding and decision-making focused on improving health, wellbeing, equity, and societal resilience, not just reducing healthcare costs.
How we use the pathways at i4PH
At the EWUU institute for Preventive Health, the pathways help us translate our shared ambition into concrete action. We use them as a compass for shaping our research agenda, developing new collaborations, guiding seed-funded projects, and bringing together partners from science, policy, healthcare, industry, and society.
The pathways also help us ask sharper questions: Who needs to be involved? Which systems need to change? How can prevention become easier, fairer, more sustainable, and more investable? In this way, they provide a shared language for dialogue and decision-making, while helping us move from vision to practice.
Let’s explore the pathways together
The future of preventive health will not be shaped by one organisation or one sector. It requires collaboration across science, policy, healthcare, industry, and society. The Preventive Health Pathways are designed to support that collaboration by providing a shared language for dialogue and decision-making.
Read the abstract and the in depth white paper, explore the four pathways, and continue the conversation with us.
Whether you see opportunities for new research, policy development, cross-sector collaboration, or community engagement, we’d love to hear from you. Together, we can turn ideas into action and accelerate the transition towards a healthier Netherlands.
The research for our four Preventive Health Transitions Pathways was carried out by: Claudia Egher, Susan van Hees, Wouter Boon, Roel Vermeulen commissioned by the EWUU institute for Preventive Health.