A Strengthened Partnership Between Two Organizations with Complementary Missions

Epidemiological surveillance generates a wealth of descriptive data that contributes to our understanding of the health status of populations in real-world settings. Prevention and health promotion efforts must be based on interventions that have proven effective. These key areas of public health thus require ongoing and essential collaboration with research.

Surveillance and research are, in fact, mutually reinforcing. Surveillance, in particular, helps generate new scientific hypotheses that must be tested through research; research, in turn, can identify health issues that need to be precisely quantified and subject to dedicated surveillance. Furthermore, new knowledge derived from research informs the expert assessments and analyses produced to support public decision-making, contributes to innovations that promote health-friendly environments, and also generates hypotheses regarding emerging risks.

Given the complementary nature of their activities and the synergies to be developed, Santé publique France and Inserm have established priority areas of cooperation to strengthen exchanges and cooperation mechanisms at the intersection of research, surveillance, prevention and health promotion interventions, and expertise, in support of public health decision-making.

Shared themes and strengthened common tools

This ambition reinforces existing and, in some cases, long-standing collaborations on numerous topics, such as in the field of nutrition. Building on a longstanding partnership, the field of infectious diseases and their modeling received particular support during the SARS-CoV-2 health crisis, in collaboration with ANRS|MIE, and is now the focus of new collaborative projects. Social health inequalities are also a major issue highlighted at the heart of the health crisis and one that requires in-depth work at the intersection of research, surveillance, health promotion, and expertise.

The aim, therefore, is to strengthen scientific output across these various themes by mobilizing research to support public interventions and policies. Finally, the two institutions are also jointly committed to addressing major public health challenges, such as the impact of environmental factors—and in particular climate change—on health, mental health, and perinatal health. The goal here is to mobilize researchers—whether in basic or applied research—to support decision-making and interventions.

To advance these scientific ambitions, this agreement establishes an operational framework for collaboration among scientific staff, while ensuring the quality and independence of expertise as well as respect for the intellectual property rights of both institutions. These collaborations include, in particular, the provision of experts, the conduct of expert assessments, the generation of data, and the creation of joint teams.

The collaboration between the two organizations also covers tools and infrastructure supporting the missions and priorities of both entities:

• cohorts, data infrastructures, and large-scale health surveys;

• morbidity registries, and strategies for surveillance, disease description, and evaluative assessment of diagnostic and therapeutic care;

• the National Registry of Medical Causes of Death (or CépiDc).