Municipalities' Role in Prevention and Health Promotion, 2014

«Municipalities' Role in Prevention and Health Promotion, 2014» addressed one of the two main areas of Samhandlingsreformen; namely public health - understood as health promoting and disease preventing measures. In parallel with the efforts of undertaking specialist health functions and sub-finance hospitalizations, the municipalities also promote health and prevent lifestyle-related illnesses such as diabetes 2, overweight and cardiovascular disease. In the longer term, the goal is that health promotion and prevention will reduce municipal expenses for hospitalization. The municipalities have a number of agencies that carry out public health-related work. We wanted to investigate how the public health work was organized, coordinated, which cooperative relations were developed and what type of measures were implemented. Some diseases are particularly common among parts of the immigrant population, and the project had a particular focus on this. We wanted to study municipalities with large amounts of immigrants to see if they introduced special measures towards this group. Public health work is both costly and labor-intensive. The main question is if the grips of the reform itself - economic incentives, regulations and demands for cooperation - are enough to create the desired pressure on such work.