Dear Arnfinn, you are raising some very legitimate issues. A few quick answers:
- I would be happy to emphasise the role of school health services. They are mentioned in the implementation description for
Norway, using the text you have provided. They can also be mentioned more broadly, but we need to be mindful that not all countries will have them, or at least not with the same characteristics.
- We can tone down the commitment to TUTCH and To Sem Jaz (the latter, I believe is already quite toned down). I will also ask
CHOICE if they can provide some literature supporting medical student delivery of health literacy programmes.
- As a general principle, what we are presenting in the proposal is a starting point. The co-creation and national adaptation
process that will take place at the start of the project (partly under your own leadership in WP4) will probably lead to slightly different intervention approaches being implemented in different settings. As long as we ensure a basic set of features are applied
across settings, to preserve the fundamental nature of the intervention approach, I think differences between countries will be acceptable.
Feel free to make specific wording suggestions when we circulate the proposal for review today.
Franco
From: Arnfinn Helleve <Arnfinn.Helleve@fhi.no>
Sent: 13 April 2026 10:59
To: Sassi, Franco <f.sassi@imperial.ac.uk>
Cc: zhealth-mgmt <zhealth-mgmt@imperial.ac.uk>; Loredana Marmora <lmarmora@isinnova.org>
Subject: A few issues
First of all I am happy and impressed with the progress you made with the proposal. It is exiting to see how much progress it is possible to make in such a short time!
Reading through there are also a few issues that I would like to raise
- I have discussed the project internally with NASKO (the national competence center for school health services at our institute) and the municipalities of Trondheim
and Bergen which all are eager to be involved in the project. As mentioned earlier I think that the interventions in Norway should be delivered through the school health services where the activities can be anchored within their guidelines. The school health
services are not that mentioned in the proposal as of now, which probably make sense, but it would therefore be great if you could confirm that you think it would be OK to work against these lines.
- I have some concerns committing ourselves too much to already existing programs like TUTCH or the Slovenian website (To sem jaz). First of all because there don't
seem to be done any research on TUTCH over the 15 years is has existed, and secondly, I am unsure how strong the evidence for peer-delivered and school-based interventions targeting alcohol, tobacco use and drugs is. I think there is a huge risk that an external
reviewer would questions this too, particularly if we commit ourselves to one specific programs. Alternatively, we use them as example that we may want to use (as I have tried to describe in the WP4 text).
- The same goes with Slovenian website. In Norway, we already have a very popular and extensive website for youth in Norway covering a wide range of relevant topics
(like critical health literacy, mental health etc.) . For the implementation of interventions in the different settings, I have been thinking that we in the beginning of the project made some sort of alignment of the content of the interventions (like the
content of TUTCH, or the content of the website) in the different national settings, yet the interventions components could be delivered by different means. Schools in Norway are generally overburdened with external actors that want to get access to schools,
while on the contrary school health nurses are very much valued in the school sector, by students, teachers and parents. In Norway, therefore, it would be probably better (and easier to get access to schools) if school health nurses delivered intervention
elements in stead of external medical students. I hope that this is in line with your thinking too.