European Structural Funds and Health

The European Structural Funds for 2007 to 2013 were one route by which money reached health work in the member states. They were not a single fund but the Union's regional and social investment instruments, agreed for a seven-year period and spent through Operational Programmes drawn up between the Commission and each member state or region.

That structure explains why finding the money took work. A health initiative - a programme to get inactive people moving, a scheme run in clubs or community settings, the training of the staff who deliver it - could be financed only if the priorities of the Operational Programme covering its area allowed it. Two countries with similar health needs could be in completely different positions, because their programmes were written by different authorities around different regional priorities. The practical question for anyone in the sector was therefore not whether money existed, but whether health was among the priorities their own programme had set.

EHFA set out the funding possibilities the Structural Funds offered for national initiatives, and pointed readers to a report on health and the Structural Funds 2007-2013, which surveyed the resources available for health in the Operational Programmes of the 27 member states. Alongside the report, the association held a country assessment for thirteen member states: Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

The Structural Funds were one of the few European sources that could pay for work at national and regional level, which is where instructors are trained and where activity programmes are actually delivered. The association's interest in them followed from its interest in every other European instrument: the standards it set were worth only what their use made them worth, and money that financed training, facilities and programmes in member states decided how much use was made of them.

There was a second reason. The association argued that physical activity belongs in public health policy rather than in leisure policy alone, and the Structural Funds were a place where that argument could be made in the language of regional and social investment rather than in the language of medicine alone. A sector that could show where health money was available, country by country, was more useful to its members than one that could only ask for recognition.

The association's own EU-funded work - the vocational education projects behind the standards, and the later projects on doping education and on reaching inactive people - is described under EU projects. Its wider engagement with the institutions is under European affairs, and the funding section it belongs to starts at association partners.