Health Education Research, Vol. 15, No. 2, 233-235,
April 2000
© 2000 Oxford University Press
Book Review |
The Evidence of Health Promotion Effectiveness. Shaping Public Health in a New Europe
School of Care Sciences, University of Glamorgan, Wales
The justification for health education and health promotion interventions has had a long and tortuous history. Health education and subsequently health promotion has had to continually justify its use of resources in a way that not only satisfies methodologists, but perhaps more importantly fund holders. Indeed it could be argued that health promotion was in the vanguard of the movement that sought evidence of effectiveness. In the early days of the discipline and practice this call for evidence was half-hearted, and so the methods employed to evaluate interventions were in turn half-hearted and a little limited. Typically they would report on the number of attendees at a health education session or the number of leaflets distributed over a specific time frame.
However, over time, this simplistic view gave way to much more sophisticated attempts at evaluation. The North Karelia Project, Heartbeat Wales and the Stanford studies all attempted to grapple
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