[The Ottawa Charter: 30 years without an action plan?]

The Ottawa Charter is not an action plan, but rather a consensus document on the values and principles that should drive public health practice. It also provides, in the form of 5 lines of action, a map of the determinants of population health. In this paper, based on the lecture I delivered at the Université d’été francophone en santé publique de Besançon, I describe my vision of the Charter, what we have done with it and why it is about time we move on to operationalization of the project it embodies..