Health promotion and health education in schools : trends, effectiveness and possibilities

This report involved an extensive literature review as well as discussions with ten leading school health and traffic safety education researchers and practitioners. The findings of the report show that despite health promotion and health education activities occurring in all Victorian schools, school health related initiatives could be improved by focusing on cognitive outcomes and involving appropriate components of Health Promoting School (HPS) framework. Providing teachers with professional development and utilising interactive resources that complement the curriculum is also important. The report recommendations outline ways to improve the Health Promotion and Health Education and provide a potential framework for delivering TSE provision in schools.

Multi-sectoral health promotion and public health : the role of evidence

Background Evidence-informed health promotion and public health is an emerging and ever-changing theme in research and practice. A collaborative approach to gathering and applying evidence is crucial to implementing effective multi-sectoral health promotion and public health interventions for improved population outcomes. This paper presents an argument for the development of multi-sector evidence and discusses both facilitators and challenges to this process.

Methods Sector-specific contacts familiar with decision-making processes were selected from referrals gained through academic, government and non-government networks and interviewed (in-person or via telephone) as part of a small scale study to scope the use of evidence within non-health sectors where decisions are likely to impact on public health.

Results The views gathered are preliminary, and this analysis would benefit from more extensive consultation. Nonetheless, information gathered from the interviews and literature search provide valuable insights into evidence-related decision-making paradigms which demonstrate similarities with, and differences from, those found in the health sector.

Conclusions Decisions in health promotion and public may benefit from consideration of the ways in which disciplines and sectors can work together to inform policy and practice.

Using critical ethnography to explore issues in health promotion

In this article, the author outlines the need for a critical research method in the field of health promotion to explore the determinants of health. These determinants, including healthy child development, employment and working conditions, and education, for example, underlie many of the health issues that individuals experience. They are, in turn, influenced by nebulous factors such as patterns of inequality, and cultural norms, which are difficult to research using conventional methodologies. The author provides an overview of critical ethnography as a method for health promotion research. She describes specific data collection and analysis techniques, with the addition of critical discourse analysis to add scope to ethnographic findings. She concludes with an overview of the congruence between critical ethnography and health promotion research, including a discussion of the differences between critical ethnography and participatory action research.

Who gets what : politics, evidence, and health promotion

Science journal, starting with its July 2005 issue, presents its readers with 125 questions and problems yet to be resolved by the scientific community. These range from the deceptively simple (‘what is the structure of water?’), the obvious (‘what triggers puberty?’ or ‘what are the roots of human culture?’), to the amazingly esoteric (‘do mathematically interesting zero-value solutions of the Riemann zeta function all have the form of a+bi?’).

Quantitative evaluation in health promotion : evaluation with confidence

Over the past 10 years or so, confidence intervals have become increasingly recognised in program evaluation and quantitative health measurement generally as the preferred way of reporting the accuracy of statistical estimates. Statisticians have found that the more traditional ways of reporting results - using P-values and hypothesis tests - are often very difficult to interpret and can be misleading. This is particularly the case when sample sizes are small and results are 'negative' (ie P>0.05); in these cases, a confidence interval can communicate much more information about the sample and, by inference, about the population. Despite this trend among statisticians and health promotion evaluators towards the use of confidence intervals, it is surprisingly difficult to find succinct and reasonably simple methods to actually compute a confidence interval. This is particularly the case for proportions or percentages. Much of the data which are analysed in health promotion are binary or categorical, rather than the quantities and continuous variables often found in laboratories or other branches of science, so there is a need for health promotion evaluators to be able to present confidence intervals for percentages or proportions. However, the most popular statistical analysis computer package among health promotion professionals, SPSS does not have a routine to compute a simple confidence interval for a proportion! To address this shortcoming, I present in this paper some fairly simple strategies for computing confidence intervals for population percentages, both manually and using the right computer software.