Project Profile

The Nova Scotia Health Promotion and Promising Practices Project

All health promoters seek to implement good practices that are known to work, yet many in Nova Scotia are unsure where to seek information about successful heath promotion practices that have been implemented in the Nova Scotia context. There are also many innovative approaches to health promotion taking place throughout Nova Scotia, but most community-based health promoters do not have access to large budgets for evaluation and their often limited resources make it difficult for them to find the time to share information about their practices with other health promoters. This issue was recognized by a number of health promotion stakeholders.

The Health Promotion Promising Practices Project was a collaborative initiative of the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Nova Scotia, Canadian Cancer Society: Nova Scotia Division, and Cancer Care Nova Scotia, supported by the Public Health Agency of Canada. Building upon past efforts in the province to build capacity to use a best practice approach in health promotion, the purpose of the project is to determine what supports are required to enable community- based health promoters to document and share their promising practices and to develop criteria for promising practice in health promotion in the Nova Scotia context.  PMCS worked with the Project’s Steering Committee for over a year to create and test an approach to documenting and sharing health promotion promising practices for organizations that have very limited resources for evaluation.

PMCS worked with the Heart and Stroke Foundation to:

• developing a project plan that outlined the main implementation steps of the Project;

• developing an evaluation plan including a Project logic model that outlined project activities, processes and structures, outputs and intended outcome;

• facilitating the adaptation of existing national promising practice criteria to fit the Nova Scotia context, resulting in the development of promising practice criteria level 3 criteria;

• developing the process for call for nominations of innovative health promotion initiatives that would be willing to test the adapted criteria (case studies);

• developing the application process and the process for review and selection of case study initiatives;

• developing and facilitating of the process to review initiatives against the criteria;

• assisting in the identification of a review panel, including provincial and national health promotion stakeholders and experts;

• developing a website to share information about the Project;

• planning and facilitating a workshop for health promotion stakeholders who are interested in findings ways of documenting and sharing health promotion promising practices; and

• developing a summary report.

Throughout the Project, PMCS worked with stakeholders to:

• ensure that the Project remained linked to the national promising practice work;

• identify lessons learned throughout the process;

• find ways of encouraging health promoters to evaluate and share their work while at the same time implementing a process to help identify those practices that have been shown to be successful in Nova Scotia; and

• identify the best means of eventually creating a health promotion promising practices database to facilitate easier identification of practices that are worth considering for implementation elsewhere.