Community interventions: Building on research evidence and implementing in local settings

Complex community interventions in health promotion provide challenges for evidence-based research and practice. This is because health promotion work uses the existing strategies, initiatives, structures and channels, and is done in participatory, empowering and ownership-based manner. The purpose of the presentation is to describe how rigorous research evidence is used to plan and apply health promotion interventions for practice in communities.
In community-based health promotion, research evidence on health determinants informs what needs to be done. Evidence on effectiveness of interventions informs what can be done in certain settings. However, what is actually done in practice depends on political and social factors, and how it is done depends on the resources, structures and stakeholders involved. Non-research documents as well as local stakeholders such as different professionals but also lay people have a lot of implicit know–how on setting-based implementation, which can prove fruitful in intervention planning, implementation and evaluation. In health promotion, considering context ranges from changing policies and environment to mobilizing and engaging local and regional resources to enable people to improve their health. The presentation gives examples and describes new approaches to consider contextual variation while maintaining scientific rigor both in implementing community interventions in different settings and in evaluating the outcome of interventions.