Road Safety

In Europe, road traffic injuries are one of the leading causes for Disability Adjusted Life-Years. Alcohol and drug consumption are leading risk factors. Transmittable diseases like HIV/AIDS are also becoming a threat to the health of young adults.

The HEROES project receives funding from the European Union in the framework of the Public Health Programme, but also closely linked to the European Road Safety Charter’s objectives to help reducing road safety fatalities. This Charter is a European participatory platform made up of enterprises, associations, research institutions and public authorities. These actors undertake to carry out concrete actions and share their good practices in order to resolve the road safety problems that they encounter in their day-to-day environments. More info: http://www.erscharter.eu

With the HEROES project, the aim was to link road safety efforts with drug, alcohol and aids prevention.

Nowadays youngsters’ health is influenced by their day-to-day behavior. Educative prevention and field actions have to be organized at many levels such as road safety, alcohol, drug and aids prevention because all those topics have an influence on young people’s health. Importantly, peer-to-peer communication has be shown to be an efficient way of communicating key health issues to young people. The HEROES project is bringing together several associations using peer-to-peer communication across these 4 fields.

The use of campaign materials developed in the HEROES project will offer a high visibility to the activities of the volunteers, students and/or peer educators and add to their cost effectiveness, as the volunteers will work for free. Attention will also be paid to wider socio-economic considerations and to the reduction of health inequalities. Synergies with other activities co-funded by the European Commission (DG TREN, Youth programs ...) and other institutions conveying risk and protective factors with an impact on lifestyles and behaviors will be taken into account.

More info: http://ec.europa.eu/index_en.htm