Healthy Russia’s strategic approach includes the following main components:

• Creating a supportive environment for change: Conducting situation analyses of public health problems and presenting the results to key stakeholders; developing and using resource needs models for health care planning and policy change; widening the participation of civil society in accelerating changes in health and social systems; and working in collaboration with mass-media representatives, policy makers, health and educational decision makers to support positive changes in HIV/AIDS and RH as well as other public health areas.
• Working with youth in schools: Developing curricula and materials; conducting training for teachers, organising orientations for parents, and providing support to schools in implementing life skills for programmes that motivate young people to protect themselves against health risks, such as HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and teenage pregnancy.
• Reaching young people out of school: Widening and improving the quality of peer education programmes and improving the activities of health and social services to make them “youth-friendly” and “couple-friendly”.
• Increasing professional skills of health care providers: Increasing levels of knowledge and improving the attitudes and communication and counseling skills of health providers to change the “doctor-patient” relationship; reducing stereotype attitudes, stigma, and discrimination, and working to improve the overall quality of medical services.
• Creating mass media programmes at central and regional levels: Developing TV, radio, print media, and other mass media strategies that are linked to improved services and address various sections of the population, for social and behavioural change.
• Researching, monitoring, and evaluation: Developing and conducting quantitative and qualitative research to establish baselines, shape messages and materials, monitor progress, and measure mid-term and final results.
• Disseminating results: Using Healthy Russia’s website, workshops, symposia, and the mass media to disseminate the results of formative research and evaluations, as well as the communication materials derived from project activities.

The Project is being implemented in four regions of Russia - Ivanovo, Saratov, Orenburg, and Irkutsk. Some specific programmes are also taking place in Moscow and Moscow region. Project Hope (in-school component) and The Futures Group International with Cedpa (advocacy component) are Healthy Russia’s key and active partners.

In the framework of the Project, a Russian non-governmental organisation (NGO), the Healthy Russia Foundation, was established in 2003 with a high-level, all-Russian Board of Governors. The main task of the Foundation is to disseminate technologies and methodologies developed in the Project, as well as to develop new initiatives in healthy lifestyles and other priority public health areas through collaboration with international and bilateral donor agencies, Russian governmental and state bodies, non-governmental agencies and foundations, as well as with the private sector.

Health, Reproductive Health, HIV/AIDS, Youth.

According to organisers, data show that unhealthy lifestyle behaviours in Russia, such as smoking and alcohol abuse, are leading to increased illness and death. In addition, they say that the HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis (TB) epidemics are growing, the health of women and infants is declining, and the current Russian health system is not geared toward prevention.