Scientific Advisory Board

The Scientific Advisory Board advised EHFA on the research on which its work rested. It was independent by vocation within the association's structure, and it worked to a mandate set for it by the EHFA board.

The board gave the Scientific Advisory Board three tasks:

• To assist EHFA and its specific working groups in their strategy, from an academic point of view.
• To bring the association the latest research in the field of physical activity and health, through policy reports in the public domain.
• To provide the association with links to research in the field and to notify it of relevant research developments, meetings and congresses.

Read together, the three tasks describe a body that was not asked to write the standards itself but to keep the people who did in touch with the evidence. The first put an academic view into the discussions where the association and its working groups set direction. The second brought the latest research in, through policy reports in the public domain rather than through material only the association could see. The third kept the channel open the other way, so that work published, presented or planned elsewhere in the field reached the association rather than waiting to be found.

The chair of the Scientific Advisory Board was Professor Willem Van Mechelen, of the Vrije University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, who also chaired the steering committee of HEPA Europe at the WHO Regional Office for Europe.

A body that sets occupational standards is making claims about what a competent professional does, and in this sector those claims touch on safety as well as performance. Exercise prescription, the assessment of a client's capability and the outcomes a programme can reasonably be expected to produce are matters of research, and the research moves. A board with standing in the field could tell the association what had changed and where its framework was out of date.

There was a second reason, which mattered as much. The association's central argument to governments and to the European institutions was that physical activity belongs in health policy - that inactivity is a public health problem rather than a leisure preference. An argument of that kind is only as good as the evidence behind it, and the mandate's emphasis on published research and on links into the research community was how the association kept that evidence at hand.

The Scientific Advisory Board stood alongside the technical bodies rather than above them. Technical authority over qualifications rested with the Standards Council and its Technical Experts Group; the scientific board advised on the evidence that sat underneath that work, and on the association's positions in European affairs. Its independence within the structure was the point: advice that had to survive academic scrutiny was worth more to the association than advice that agreed with it.