Responding to Public Health Challenges (SALVE)

The overall goal of the Academy of Finland’s Responding to Public Health Challenges Research Programme (SALVE) is to provide applicable knowledge for responding to the current and future key public health issues. Instead of applying a disease-centred approach, the programme places emphasis on early intervention before the onset of disease hazards.

The aim is to

• create new knowledge aiming at significant public health impacts, in addition to scientific impacts
• enable planning, development and implementation of new procedures and policies to improve public health
• support evaluation of existing interventions and approaches in healthcare and policy;
• open new opportunities for health promotion;
• meet the information needs of society on major public health issues and health promoting activities
• intensify the dissemination of research results.

The programme stresses the application of the infrastructures and special know-how provided by Finnish society. A particular aim is to fund extensive, multidisciplinary consortium projects within the programme. Another aim is to bring together approaches applied by public health research as well as behavioural sciences, social sciences and biosciences.

The programme is divided into four thematic areas:

• Health-protecting and health-promoting factors
• Life-course approaches and critical periods of life
• Health inequalities and clustering of ill health
• Predicting future health.

The projects may involve research from one or several thematic areas.

The projects within the SALVE programme will be funded for four years. The Academy Board has reserved a total of eight million euros in funding for the programme in 2009–2012. The funding period will normally start on 1 January 2009.

The Academy of Finland has agreed on funding cooperation within the SALVE programme with a Norwegian (Research Council of Norway), a Canadian (Canadian Institutes of Health Research) and a British (Medical Research Council) funding agency.

The programme memorandum describes in more detail the background, objectives and themes of the research programme. The programme memorandum is available on the programme’s web pages at www.aka.fi/salveeng under Materials.