We all do less physical activity, due to a combination of busy lifestyles, urban design based around cars, screen time, and less access to green spaces. Sedentary behaviour is increasing in most countries resulting in major negative health, social, environmental and economic consequences. Countries need to invest in strategies that target the whole population as well as specific subgroups, particularly those facing the most challenges. Effective public policy is the best strategy to do this, as its role is to change systems instead of individuals and will allow programmes and environments to collectively enhance PA, thus reducing non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and inequity. Many countries have policies in place, but the implementation of those policies is unknown. To bridge this gap, the IMPAQT project will develop, test and promote policy benchmarking as a tool to improve policy implementation in six countries (Germany, Ireland, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland and Romania), strengthening accountability systems and improve policy. IMPAQT has six work packages (WP) with a seventh WP for management: WPs1-3 will document best practices based on the latest scientific evidence on health equity, policy monitoring and effective policy implementation in PA. It will produce country ‘evidence documents’ detailing government PA policies and their implementation status. WP4 will validate the evidence document with policymakers to ensure it is an accurate representation of government action. WP5 will recruit stakeholders representing non-government experts in PA and citizens from each country. These will independently assess implementation of their countries’ policies against best practices identified by WPs1-3. This will produce country report cards identifying critical implementation gaps and recommendations. WP6 will bring the individual country reports together and create a unified report for citizens, scientific communities, policy makers and the European Parliament.
