Abstract
Public health systems across Europe face persistent challenges, including population ageing, rising healthcare costs, workforce shortages, and enduring health inequalities. Intersectoral collaboration at the community level, combined with meaningful citizen engagement, is widely recognised as a crucial strategy to address these challenges and to develop health promotion initiatives that are equitable and responsive to local needs. Despite this recognition, professionals frequently struggle to implement such collaborations in practice. Commonly reported barriers include unclear roles and responsibilities between partners, limited time and financial resources, siloed organisational structures, weak agenda-setting processes at the neighbourhood level, and difficulties engaging a diverse group of citizens beyond the “usual suspects”. This PechaKucha presentation session addresses these challenges by focusing on the practical use of tools and methods that support intersectoral collaboration and citizen engagement. The aim of this session is to inspire participants through practical, adaptable tools and to equip them with knowledge to co-create or adapt tools that strengthen intersectoral collaboration and meaningful citizen engagement. Drawing on insights from two research projects, the session presents tools that were co-created with professionals, active citizens, researchers, teachers, and students. These tools aim to (1) strengthen and sustain collaboration networks and (2) support the joint identification and prioritisation of neighbourhood health issues in collaboration with citizens. The added value of this session lies in its strong practice orientation and interactive format. Rather than focusing solely on barriers, the PechaKucha session provides concrete, transferable tools that participants can use to adapt to their local contexts or to design and co-create their own tools. The session consists of three PechaKucha presentations that draw on action research and design-based research to address key challenges and facilitators in intersectoral collaboration and citizen engagement at the neighbourhood level, and that introduce co-design principles and tools that form the basis for the interactive session. After the presentations, participants can discuss tools, share experiences from their own practices, and jointly reflect on how to adapt or further develop them for their own practices.
Key messages
• Practical, co-created tools support intersectoral collaboration and enable more inclusive citizen engagement in community health promotion.
• A step-by-step, interactive approach strengthens collaboration networks and supports the translation of neighbourhood issues into shared health promotion agendas.