The evolution of the WHO city health profiles: a content review

The WHO European Healthy Cities project developed city health profiles (CHPs) to provide the evidence base for health planning. A CHP is a public health report that brings together key pieces of information on health and its determinants in the city and interprets and analyses the information. This CHP would then form the basis of a city health development plan that would set out strategies and programmes of intervention to improve the health of a city's population. A content review of the CHPs produced by the cities in the WHO European Healthy Cities Network in 1995 and repeated 10 years later, attempted to undertake a systematic and comprehensive content review of the CHPs. The results show that in both reviews, demographic information was covered comprehensively. The inadequate coverage of areas of health status and socio-economic conditions in the 1995 review was covered comprehensively in 2005. Coverage of lifestyles, infrastructures and public health policies and services had improved since the 1995 review. The findings indicate that profiles presenting information on health and its determinants provide an evidence-base to inform health planning for the city. However, problems were still encountered in undertaking appropriate analysis to identify inequalities within the city and make recommendations that could be translated into targets. Just as the cities have adapted and evolved throughout the WHO Healthy Cities project, so have CHPs. The range of health profiles produced by cities demonstrate how they have evolved from basic tools that started by collecting routinely available information on death and disease to sophisticated mechanisms that gather an array of relevant information from a wide variety of sources through a range of methods. Most cities have understood the concept of a CHP as an evidence-based tool to inform health policy and planning and to strengthen the public health agenda.