HEALTHY CITY PROJECT

The Hanseatic City of Rostock became member of the Healthy City Network on the basis of the citizens resolution. On December 1992 the working group "Local Health Promotion" was founded for the realisation of the Healthy City Project of the World Health Organisation in Rostock. It is tied up to the public health authorities and aims to develop a role model "Healthy City" on a long-term basis.

The development of a "Healthy City" leads to a better use of local resources, promotes the bonds with the own living place and the support among the citizens as well as the ability of the individual and institutions to care for health in the sense of the WHO-definition. Health promotion is therefore part of the local policy.

As a support instrument the working group has taken over the function to accompany the process of a preventive public health policy, to take up the mentioned objectives and to set appropriate accents. Co-ordinated by the department for health promotion more than 50 partners - offices of the city administration, associations, federations of the free welfare services, self-help groups, education authorities, schools and others - work together since 1992. Cooperation is voluntary, result-orientated, bound to no statute and considers the respective identity of the partners.

The aim of the "Healthy City Project" is, among other things, to create a selfhelp-friendly climate in Rostock, to allow and ensure networking and exchange of experience between self-help groups and initiatives and by promoting self-help contact point to guarantee consultation and support for the groups as well as for Rostock's citizens.

The "Rostocker Pot" as a union of more than 100 health, social and illness-referred self-help groups and initiatives forms the platform for the participation of people within local health promotion. In more than three years one of the working group "Coordination of Initiatives for a Healthpromoting Infrastructure" compiled e. g. the testing method "Child-friendly City" that contains criteria, which can be set also as a standard for a healthy city and has become one of the official instructions for employees of the city administration on June, 1^st, 1999.

The testing method to child friendliness has the target to protect the realisation of interests of children and young people as inhabitants in the municipality lastingly. By giving specifications and by increased efforts the aim of the testing method to the child friendliness to plan and arrange the future of our city in such a way that children and young people can develop universally and healthy is to be realised.

In January 2000 resulting from this aim developed the Project "Equal Chances and Health for Children in Evershagen". The city of Rostock operates together with 50 other municipalities and districts in Germany to reduce the existing social and health chance inequalities. In that way it is not only fixed in the guidelines for local development, also the report of the working group "Local Health Promotion" to the citizens contains a view on the future department-sharing work for the healthy city project concerning this objective.

The working group admits responsibility for common activities to the decrease of social and health chance inequality of children according to the "UN Children's Convention". The grown and stable co-operation structures in the health promotion enable it to direct the entire available forces toward a direct town-quarter work.

As the field of activity the city district Evershagen was selected as one of the big building settlements in the Northwest of the city.

1. to develop a child-friendly policy on a long-term basis,
2. to organise a district conference to the topic "Equal Chances and Health for Children in Evershagen",
3. to result in a networking of the health and social supplying structures existing in the quarter,
4. to get a direct health-promoting intervention going and
5. to link all activities with the residential environment improvement programme in the district and check them for child friendliness".