Day two of Velo-city 2019 will start with an engaging discussion on the importance of being happy and healthy!

The World Health Organisation is increasingly sharpening its focus on delivering a global action plan that creates urban environments which foster more physical activity. This can be achieved by prioritising infrastructure for more walking, cycling and public transport, as well as green and pleasant areas for kids and adults.

This session will explore research on the importance of health in urban environments from a global perspective of healthier and happier communities and showcase good practices on how cities and organisations are prioritizing this topic.

WHO developed the Health Economic Assessment Tool (HEAT) to enable users without expertise in impact assessment to conduct economic assessments of the health impacts of walking or cycling.

Cycling has multiple benefits. It contributes to healthier lives by helping to prevent a large number of severe and chronical diseases such as cardio-vascular diseases, diabetes (type 2), and breast cancer.  4 hours after arriving in the classroom, concentration levels of children who are cycling or walking to school are 8% higher than for those who are getting a lift by car. Employees that cycle to work regularly have on average 1.3 days less sickness absence per year. You can find an extensive analysis of the benefits of cycling in this report.

The debate in this plenary session is a central discussion under one of the three main conference themes, ‘Health and Social’.

The speakers in this plenary session include:

Dr. Orna Donoghue (Trinity College Dublin) is the Project Manager for The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) which is a large-scale nationally representative cohort study of over 8,000 community-dwelling adults aged 50 years and over resident in Ireland. Orna is responsible for the overall planning, execution and management of the TILDA data collection process to facilitate TILDA research and policy objectives. Her current research interests focus on the factors influencing walking and mobility in older Irish adults, with a particular focus on how these can predict adverse outcomes such as falls, disability and cognitive decline.

Dr. Matthew Philpott (Health Stadia) is the Executive Director of European Healthy Stadia Network. He is responsible for the overall operations and growth of Healthy Stadia, including partnership development and programme management, and liaises directly with key partners at UEFA, EU and European public health agencies. Prior to this, Matthew worked in the private sector in the area of marketing and communications, working on a number of national public health accounts in the UK. Matthew originally worked as a doctoral and post-doctoral researcher at University of Warwick, gaining a PhD in Philosophy and Psychology in 2001. His research is widely published and has included working with a cross-section of professionals from the health sector, local/national government, voluntary sectors and professional sports agencies, including national and European governing bodies of sport.

Lucy Saunders (Healthy Streets) is a public health specialist, urbanist and transport planner. She created the Healthy Streets Approach, an evidence based-framework for decision making at every level to embed public health in city transport, public realm, and planning. Building on her success in London she now shares her expertise with cities and regions globally. Her highly influential work put health at the heart of city policy in London. Healthy Streets is the framework of the Mayor’s 25-year Transport Strategy, a pillar of the London Plan (spatial plan) and part of all the Mayor’s statutory strategies. She developed bespoke Healthy Streets tools to enable practitioners to apply the Healthy Streets Approach in horizon scanning, case making, design, implementation, and evaluation. She has trained over 500 practitioners in the UK and overseas. She is a Fellow of the UK Faculty of Public Health and has masters degrees in geography and public health.

Join the discussion at Velo-city 2019! Click here to register for the conference.

For more information on the Velo-city Programme, Exhibition and Registration go to: https://www.velo-city2019.com 
Sign up for our newsletter: https://abbey.us9.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=fd5fa9b846888ef25e85f1973&id=75273fab2e
Follow us on social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn