The Observatory is a partnership hosted by WHO that supports and promotes evidence-based health policy-making in Europe. It has four core functions: Country monitoring: providing analytic and evaluative descriptions of country health systems and systematically monitoring developments; Analysis: exploring how health systems ‘work’ through secondary and comparative research, multi-disciplinary studies and policy briefs on key and emerging challenges; Performance assessment: supporting the development and interpretation of indicators for practical policy use and to help improve performance; Knowledge brokering: making Observatory evidence visible and useful to its target audiences by unpacking and sharing it in a range of formats. To receive the latest evidence and event information, sign up at www.tinyurl.com/OBSupdates