Measuring the Impact of Community Health Interventions
Detailed evaluations are now in on 26 of the more than 40 Healthy Eating Active Living (HEAL) community collaboratives that Kaiser Permanente supported in 2011, and the findings have a lot to say about the progress achieved and the work remaining. For one thing, the evaluation team reports that the hundreds of health interventions and of community change strategies in the HEAL communities will have touched more than a half million lives when fully implemented.
Measuring the Impact of HEAL Collaboratives' Community Interventions
Kaiser Permanente’s place-based HEAL efforts originated in 2006 in the Colorado Region with just three collaborative partnerships between Kaiser Permanente’s Community Benefit program and local public and nonprofit organizations working to improve the health of their communities, focusing especially on obesity prevention. Today, major efforts go into measuring and evaluating the impacts those interventions have in order to fine-tune the initiatives and produce better health outcomes.
Findings from the 2011 evaluations include the following:
- A total of 510 distinct community change strategies were being implemented, including school and worksite wellness policies, body mass index screenings in community clinics, creating community gardens, and improving infrastructure for walking and biking. These strategies will affect nearly 500,000 people through community-based interventions in neighborhoods, worksites, and health clinics and another 148,000 children through school-based interventions.
- The strategies are working on every level of the socio-ecological spectrum: 24 percent focus on individuals and families, 23 percent on environmental change, 30 percent on organizational and public policy change, and 23 percent on building local expertise and infrastructure.
- Fifty-nine percent of strategies are focused on neighborhoods (e.g., refurbishment of parks, grocery-store improvement); 21 percent on schools (e.g., cafeteria reforms); 11 percent on workplaces (e.g., campaigns to promote stairwell use); and nine percent on the health sector (e.g., body mass index screenings).
Impact Newsletter
April 2012
Kaiser Permanente Co-Sponsors HBO’s Four-Hour Weight of the Nation Series
Kaiser Permanente Hospitals Commit to Breastfeeding Initiative
Kaiser Permanente Issues HIV Challenge
Eco-Friendly Medical Equipment to Replace Chemical-Laden IV Equipment
MLK Day Draws Thousands of Kaiser Permanente Volunteers
Kaiser Permanente Sponsoring New Safety-Net Fellowship
Kaiser Permanente Recognized as Top Company for Diversity by DiversityInc
