General background
WHO Healthy Cities approach values the importance of health and wellbeing in the decision making and activities of cities. It seeks to build a strong local level movement for public health. Healthy Cities has been running in Europe since 1987.The city health development plan (CHDP) seeks to put health to the political agenda and embed health as apart of all activities in a city.

During the Healthy Cities project there has been developed several tools to support this work, for example health profiles and health impact assessment. City health profile is an important tool for a city health development plan and in creating Healthy Cities. These elements are also in the background of developing the Baltic Profile.

Context of the Association
The Association started to develop the Baltic Profile in 2002 and agreed with Healthy City coordinators in the region to collect diverse information about the Healthy Cities work and experiences. The aim is to produce a profile, which would include more than Healthy City indicators. The association continued the development in 2003 together with the Turku School of Economics, and the first version of the profile was launched in 2003. In 2007 the development of the profile continued with a new website and electronic questionnaire. They ease the collection and input of the information, and thereby, the Baltic Profile has more up-to-date information divided into four categories. Developing and maintaining the Baltic Profile serves the Healthy Cities network as well as the goals of WHO and the Association.

Goal
The goal of the operational entity "Capacity Building of Cities" is to enhance the capacity of decision-makers to put heath as a core of the decision making of the cities. This will be done by organising conferences, offering tools as well as disseminating and collecting the best practises from the network cities.

Have a look on Baltic Profile www.marebalticum.org/balticprofile