Research and Practice of Health Promotion, Volume 06,1: Evaluation as a Quality Assurance Tool in Health Promotion

How can the effectiveness of health promotion programmes be monitored? How can their strengths and weaknesses be identified? The subject of quality assurance is also playing an increasingly important role in health promotion. In this context, it is not simply a matter of putting the available financial resources to the most effective use, but also and even primarily of reviewing and improving the quality and effectiveness of health promotion activities.

Efforts have also been in progress for some time at the European level in order to propagate the idea of quality assurance in health promotion and to develop suitable instruments for this purpose. As programme evaluation is an important approach of the quality assurance activities in Europe, the BZgA was to carry out a project study on behalf of the European Commission to examine the extent to which this instrument can be used for the quality assurance of health promotion projects and what requirements have to be imposed on it.

The results of the study, published as Volume 6,1 of the specialist booklet series, describe the role that programme evaluation can in fact assume in the quality assurance of health promotion projects and how health promotion activities can be monitored, assessed and, if necessary, adapted with the aid of this instrument. As a kind of working paper, it presents the most important elements of a quality-oriented evaluation concept, giving a detailed description of the requirements to be imposed on it. It illustrates clearly, but in detail, how a concept of this kind can be implemented when planning, implementing and checking the success of health promotion programmes and thus how it contributes to improving the quality and effectiveness of health promotion activities.