The Stockholm region consists of 26 municipalities and about 1.8 million inhabitants lives here. Stockholm is the capital of Sweden and is about 800 years old. As it is the capital the government and many national authorities are situated in Stockholm as well as many industrial head offices. Stockholm has also a harbour and several universities.

Healthy Cities
As we are a region and can not make one city health development plan we decided to concentrate and support the development of some strategic areas – the municipalities, urban planning, work sites, physical activity and tobacco prevention.

We started some networks, one for those municipalities who wanted to be a part in the Health Cities work. The municipalities can apply to be a “Local Healthy City” if they want. To be accepted they have to describe and fulfil 12 criteria – inter-sectoral approach, political support, targets, action plan, priorities, resources, equality, overall approach, ethical aspects, participation of the population, and follow-up. One network is for people working with initiatives for tobacco prevention, one network for supporting healthy work sites, one network for people working with health information to the general public. The networks have also arranged conferences and seminars.

We also decided to have a theme of “Healthy Urban Planning” with conferences, seminars and lectures during Phase III. Target population is municipality politicians, urban planners, health planners, road and house constructors.

This spring, 2002, we carried out a conference addressing Children, Youth, Integration and Health to pay attention to this problem and to make the UN Children’s convention an important part of the Healthy Cities work.

The new Public Health Report/Profile of the Stockholm County can be found in Swedish at http://www.folkhalsoguiden.se/