Overall this research concludes that only a minority of students exhibited positive health practices at international recommended levels as regards fruit/vegetable consumption and physical activity.Conversely, large proportions of the sample engaged in risk taking behaviours such as binge drinking and illicit drug use. Even when the prevalence of some advantageous behaviours of the UK students were slightly more positive than those of students from other countries, this calls for increased awareness of university leaders and decision makers to the health and well-being needs of students.We found remarkable clustering effects of advantageous as well as disadvantageous health practices among students from
certain sites which highlighted the need for university-specificlocal health profiles as a well-founded basis for health promotion programmes implemented at universities. Universities should support healthy lifestyles of students through healthy food choices, a range of campus sports and exercise activities, in addition to appropriate health-enhancing alcohol and smoking policies. Moreover, while generic health promotion programmes could be useful in many settings, as seen in this study, such unique ‘individuality’ of each participating site requires attention. In such instances, generic programmes would need to be revisited and individually refined/tailored to the needs of a given university at a point in time. This also confirmed the need for continual longitudinal monitoring processes of student health and wellbeing at universities to act as a ‘barometer’ of the constantly changing health needs of different student cohorts. Many of these processes are still not in place.