[Methodological Challenges of Prevention Reporting - More to it Than Just Evidence Reporting!]

The German Prevention Act came into force in 2015 with the aim of strengthening prevention of disease and health promotion, focussing on settings-based approaches. An established field of public health action is thus strengthened and expanded by a set of rules that has largely come into force as a social security law. The implementation of legislation is to be accompanied by the establishment of a prevention reporting system.

Types of reporting are contextualized and delimited from one another by means of the planning stages of the public health action cycle with their different goals, content and data sources.

Prevention reports must reflect not only the state of health and intervention features but also intended and unintended structural changes in the public health action field. Due to its obvious relevance to the envisioned settings, the local level seems to be of particular importance. Special attention also deserves legally unintended shifts of tasks from public to social security financing. A reporting system misconceived primarily as evidence reporting would be likely to fail the intended strengthening of settings-based approaches and instead would favour downstream measures that are easier to evaluate.