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Promising Practices

The Promising Practices database informs professionals and community members about documented approaches to improving community health and quality of life.

The ultimate goal is to support the systematic adoption, implementation, and evaluation of successful programs, practices, and policy changes. The database provides carefully reviewed, documented, and ranked practices that range from good ideas to evidence-based practices.
Learn more about the ranking methodology.

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Project Youth Green (San Fernando Valley, CA)

Filed under Good Idea, Environmental Health / Built Environment, Children, Teens, Adults, Families

Goal: The Project Youth Green project is a community garden project that aims to involve families and youth in learning about local, sustainable food and gardening projects. The four acre community revitalization project focuses on youth education, community gardening and physical exercise.

Safer Sex Skills Building (SSSB) (USA)

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Immunizations & Infectious Diseases, Women

Goal: The goal of the Safer Sex Skills Building intervention is to decrease unsafe sexual behaviors through increasing condom use, safer sex negotiation skills, and HIV/STD awareness.

Impact: Safer Sex Skills Building decreases unsafe vaginal and anal sexual behaviors and instances.

Say It Straight

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Adolescent Health, Children, Teens

Goal: The goals of Say It Straight (SIS) training are prevention of risky or destructive behaviors, such as alcohol, tobacco, other drug (ATOD) use, violence, school drop-out, teen pregnancy, behaviors leading to HIV/AIDS; and promotion of wellness, personal and social responsibility, positive self-esteem and positive relationships.

Impact: SIS training results in statistically significant reductions in alcohol/drug related school suspensions. Juvenile criminal police offenses such as assaults, vandalism, burglary, etc. were also lower among trained students.

Seeking Safety

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Mental Health & Mental Disorders

Goal: The goal of this program is to help clients move beyond trauma and substance abuse.

Impact: Multiple evaluations of the Seeking Safety program in various settings have shown positive outcomes for substance abuse/addiction, substance abuse disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Supervised Injection Sites (Vancouver, British Columbia)

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Alcohol & Drug Use, Urban

Goal: Insite’s mission is to provide a safe environment for people to inject drugs and thus reduce injecting activity in public while linking drug users to health care services such as primary care, addiction counseling and treatment.

Impact: Opening supervised injected facilities have resulted in significant reductions in public injection drug use related issues and increase in referrals to social services and detoxification programs in Vancouver.

Text Reminders for Immunization Compliance in Kids (TRICKs): A Demonstration Project (Wichita, KS)

Filed under Effective Practice, Health / Children's Health, Children, Families, Urban

Goal: The goal of TRICKs was to reach out to parents using a novel reminder system and increase immunization rates at the KU pediatric clinic.

Impact: There was a significant increase in immunization rate following the implementation of parent text reminders when compared to the initial immunization rate.

Text4Health

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Immunizations & Infectious Diseases, Teens, Adults, Women, Urban

Goal: Text4Health aims to improve immunization rates in urban, underserved, low-income populations via text messaging.

The Community Immersion Program (Austin, Texas)

Filed under Good Idea, Community / Public Safety, Racial/Ethnic Minorities

Goal: The mission of the program is to develop cultural understanding and to forge relationships between police officers and citizens of Austin in order to provide better community service.

The HEALTHY Study (USA)

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Diabetes, Children, Teens, Racial/Ethnic Minorities, Urban

Goal: The primary goal of the intervention was to reduce overweight and obesity prevalence among middle school students. Ancillary goals were to improve BMI and fasting insulin values, increase water consumption, reduce consumption of beverages with added sugar, increase healthy food choices, improve self-monitoring, and increase exercise time among sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students.

Impact: School-based programs that aim to address childhood obesity and adiposity may reduce individuals' risk of developing childhood-onset of non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus.

Vamos a Nadar (Let's Go Swimming) (Sonoma)

Filed under Good Idea, Health / Prevention & Safety, Children, Families, Racial/Ethnic Minorities

Goal: To promote water safety in the Latino community.

An Effective Practice meets the following HCI criteria:

  1. The program description includes at a minimum: the sponsoring organization, program goals, program implementation steps, and outcomes that have demonstrated program success and/or promise in achieving the program goal in one or more localities.
  2. The results from an evaluation of the program include quantitative measures of improvement in outcome of interest (i.e. increase in voter registration, not just delivery of voter registration drive) and/ or the outcome measure is increased or improved compared to the baseline measurement or the control group but the difference is not statistically significant.

A Good Idea meets the following HCI criteria:

  1. The program description includes: the sponsoring organization, program goals, program funding source, program implementation steps and outcomes.
  2. The program evaluation is limited to descriptive measure(s) of success/accomplishment (i.e., program participation rates, number of services/education sessions/radio messages provided). Note: oftentimes, the program has been newly implemented and a program evaluation has not yet been conducted. Programs that have not yet been evaluated, but which show promise in improving health or quality of life, are classified as Good Ideas until an evaluation is conducted.

An Evidence-Based Practice meets the following HCI criteria:

  1. The program description includes at a minimum: the sponsoring organization, program goals, program implementation steps, and outcomes that have demonstrated program success in achieving the program goal in one or more localities.
  2. The results from an evaluation of the program include quantitative measures showing improvement in the outcome(s) of interest after the implementation of the program (i.e. increase in smoking cessation, not just the delivery of a smoking cessation program). The outcome measure(s) is/are compared at relevant time periods before and after the intervention or program implementation. Alternatively, the evaluation study compares the outcome(s) between an intervention group and an appropriate control group.
  3. The study is of peer-review quality and presents numbers in a scientific manner; measurements of precision and reliability are included (e.g. confidence intervals, standard errors), results from statistical tests show a significant difference or change in the outcome measure(s), and relevant point estimates and p-values are presented. Note: if the results from an evaluation of a program are presented in a scientific manner and the outcome measure is improved compared to the baseline measurement or the control group but the difference is not statistically significant, the practice is classified as effective and not evidence-based.
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