In various Healthy Cities meetings the Healthy Cities coordinators have expressed their wishes of including, not only indicators, but more qualitative and descriptive information about the everyday Healthy Cities work in the Health Profiles. At the end of 2002 the Healthy Cities coordinators in the Baltic Region agreed to collect information from this point of view from their cities. The first version of the Baltic Profile was collected in 2003. The document consisted of some baseline Healthy City indicators and brief descriptions of the best practises in the cities.

During 2003 and 2004 in cooperation with the Turku School of Economics and Business Administration the Baltic Region Healthy Cities Association carried out a prestudy on how to develop the Baltic Profile and established an information technology based web-service, and a virtual Baltic Profile was born! The pilot version of the website was launched in October 2004.

During 2003-2005 the European Healthy Cities meetings and Baltic Sea Region Healthy Cities coordinators meetings have been used to strengthen the engagement of the coordinators on the development of the Baltic Profile.

The opinions, views and experiences on the Baltic Profile were mapped in 2006. A questionnaire was carried out from the viewpoints of the current form and information gathering of the profile. The questionnaire clarified the opinions about the current form, information gathering and the future development of the profile. The questions were asked from Healthy City coordinators, personnel from Healthy City office, members from Healthy City steering group and other persons named by Healthy City coor-dinator whose city belongs to the Baltic Profile

The results of the questionnaire are here.