EU Screening Week - Know Your Numbers Campaign

The initiative aims to create a visible European moment around World Heart Day on 29 September, mobilising partner organisations across Europe to promote prevention, early awareness and practical health checks where feasible.

It is not a top-down medical screening programme. Rather, it provides a common campaign framework that brings together organisations, professional networks, patient groups, public-health actors and other partners to make prevention more visible and accessible to citizens.

Why the Know Your Numbers Campaign?

Many people feel healthy but may still have silent risk factors, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol or high blood sugar. These can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and other cardiometabolic conditions.

The Know Your Numbers campaign is based on a simple and practical message: people should know the key numbers that can help them understand their health risks earlier.

The campaign encourages people to:

• Know their blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar.
• Speak to a doctor, pharmacist, nurse or trusted health professional.
• Take action earlier, before symptoms appear.

The approach is people-centred: it is about helping individuals understand their health risks earlier and empowering them to take informed steps for their health and wellbeing.

Link with the Safe Hearts Plan

EU Screening Week is part of the wider prevention agenda of the Safe Hearts Plan.

The Safe Hearts Plan aims to strengthen cardiovascular health in Europe, with prevention as a central pillar. Cardiovascular diseases remain one of the leading public-health challenges in the EU, and many risk factors can be detected and managed earlier.

EU Screening Week helps translate this policy ambition into a practical, citizen-facing action: encouraging people to know the numbers that matter and supporting partners to bring prevention messages closer to communities.

What is the objective?

The initiative aims to:

• Raise awareness of cardiometabolic risk factors.
• Encourage people to take prevention seriously.
• Promote earlier detection of risks.
• Support local, national and European prevention activities.
• Make existing partner actions more visible under a shared European banner.
• Build momentum for the broader Know Your Numbers campaign in 2027.

For the first edition, the ambition is pragmatic but visible: to encourage activity across as many Member States as possible, ideally ensuring that something happens in every Member State, whether through screening, awareness, local outreach, media activity or digital promotion