Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) remain the leading cause of mortality across the European Union, accounting for approximately four million deaths annually and generating profound economic and social costs that disproportionately affect vulnerable and lower-income populations. Despite decades of clinical progress, significant gaps persist in prevention, early detection and integrated care. The adoption of the Safe Hearts Plan (SHP) by the European Commission in December 2025 marks a pivotal shift in EU health policy: the first-ever comprehensive strategy dedicated to tackling CVD at the supranational level, structured around three interconnected pillars — prevention, early detection and screening, and treatment and care.

This pre-conference, co-organised by JACARDI, JA PreventNCD, the EUPHA Chronic Diseases Section and the EUPHA Public Health Monitoring and Reporting Section, presents the European Joint Actions as the primary operational mechanism for translating the SHP’s political mandate into evidence-based, cross-country action. The session opens by framing the policy context of the Safe Hearts Plan and grounding the discussion in the latest epidemiological evidence on the burden of CVD and diabetes across Member States, including geographic, gender and socioeconomic disparities and persistent gaps in health system response.

Each pillar of the SHP is then examined through the lens of concrete Joint Action outputs. Under Pillar 1 (Prevention), the session explores how Joint Actions address population-level prevention approaches encompassing health literacy, awareness-raising, social determinants and structural inequalities, as well as cross-cutting topics including health taxation, climate change and environmental risk factors. Under Pillar 2 (Early Detection and Screening), the session explores the evidence base for structured screening programmes and health checks across Member States, the role of workplace settings as an underexplored node for CVD and diabetes detection, system-level monitoring frameworks, approaches to identifying individuals at risk, and emerging clinical recommendations for EU-wide cardiometabolic health check protocols. Under Pillar 3 (Treatment and Care), the session discusses how Joint Actions examines integrated care pathways, self-management support and patient empowerment, alongside comparative health system performance data that contextualises these findings within broader policy implications for Member States.

A dedicated session on cross-cutting foundations explores how Joint Actions are actively bridging critical implementation gaps within the SHP. Drawing on frameworks developed and tested across multiple Member States, the session demonstrates how Joint Actions are embedding equity and diversity inclusion as foundational principles of cardiovascular policy, advancing interoperable data governance and monitoring systems with direct linkages to the European Health Data Space, and pioneering the integration of digital technologies and AI into prevention and care pathways. The session further identifies outstanding research gaps where sustained, cross-country Joint Action collaboration offers the most promising avenue for generating the evidence base that national systems alone cannot produce.

The pre-conference concludes with a high-level roundtable convening EU institutions, international organisations, scientific bodies and civil society to discuss the governance models, long-term financing, accountability mechanisms and pathways needed to embed Joint Action results into sustainable national cardiovascular health implementation beyond the current funding cycle.

Expected Outcomes

• Demonstrate how JACARDI and JA PreventNCD operationalise each of the three pillars of the Safe and Hearts Plan through concrete, cross-country evidence and pilot results
• Showcase Joint Actions as effective EU mechanisms for translating political commitments into evidence-based national policies on CVD and diabetes prevention and care
• Generate policy-relevant recommendations for Member States and EU institutions on scaling Joint Action findings within national cardiovascular health plans
• Strengthen cross-country collaboration among JA partners, EU institutions, clinical societies and civil society stakeholders committed to reducing the burden of CVD and diabetes in Europe

Main Messages

Joint Actions are a European effective mechanism for translating political commitment on cardiovascular health into actionable, cross-country evidence. JACARDI and JA PreventNCD have generated harmonised, policy-ready outputs across all three pillars of the Safe Hearts Plan, from prevention and screening to integrated care, demonstrating that multi-country collaboration is not a coordination overhead, but a structural advantage in producing comparable evidence that individual Member States cannot generate alone.

Equity must be embedded as a foundational principle, not a supplementary consideration, in SHP implementation. The burden of CVD and diabetes is not evenly distributed: geographic, gender and socioeconomic disparities shape both risk exposure and access to care. Joint Actions that systematically incorporate equity and diversity frameworks, and that include civil society and patient voices in accountability structures, are better positioned to generate interventions that are both effective and transferable across the diverse health systems of the EU.