EHFA announced in January 2009 that Prof Van Mechelen would chair its Scientific Advisory Board. The board was the association's route to the research literature: it advised on the evidence behind the qualifications standards and on the association's positions in public health debates, so that the framework rested on what the science supported rather than on what the sector found convenient.
The announcement was made in a press release dated 23 January 2009, with the full text issued as an attachment. It came at a point when the association's standards work was moving from an argument about principle into the drafting of qualifications that national education systems could reference.
That mattered more than it might sound. A national qualifications body can write standards from its own training tradition. A European one cannot: it has to justify the same competences to educators in a dozen countries with different curricula, different regulatory frameworks and different ideas about how much science an instructor needs. Evidence from exercise science and public health was the common ground the argument could be made on.
The evidence carried weight outside the standards as well. The health case for physical activity rested on a body of research rather than on the sector's own claims, and that research was the strongest argument the sector had when it asked to be treated as part of the health workforce rather than as a leisure industry.
The Scientific Advisory Board sat alongside the Standards Council, which held technical authority over the qualifications themselves, and the Technical Experts Group, which worked on the standards in detail. See SAB for the board's role.