Health promotion practice

Good practice health promotion involves using this common planning framework. This framework stresses the interrelated set of actions including:

1. Planning including: Vision setting, Priority setting and problem definition, Solution generation, Capacity building support and resourcing for quality integrated health promotion action, Planning for evaluation and dissemination
2. Implementation
3. Evaluation (process, impact, outcome) & Dissemination

When planning, implementing and evaluating integrated health promotion programs, there are key steps to ensuring quality practice. These steps are collectively known as program management. The key features of program management are:

• A constantly evolving and interrelated set of actions, including planning, implementing, evaluating and ensuring the quality and effectiveness of practice. This is reflected in Figure 1.
• The collection of data, or evidence, at each stage of the cycle of planning, implementation and evaluation.¹

Figure 1 The cyclic nature of program management for integrated health promotion.

The program management for integrated health promotion program linking to impacts and outcomes on page 32 of the IHP Resource Kit: A practice guide for service providers shows the link between this common framework linked with a hierarchy of different impacts and outcomes.

Footnotes:

1. Glanz, K. (1996), Achieving best practice in health promotion: future directions, Health Promotion Journal of Australia, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 25–8.