Abstract
Background: Valuable learning derived from public health practice can be captured through practice-based case studies, also known as practice examples. Practice examples of participatory interventions supplement the evidence base by providing information on the complexities of implementation in communities. This paper reports on a Public Health England project to build a bank of community-centered practice examples based on robust processes of collection and curation.
Methods: The multidisciplinary project had three phases: (i) development and piloting a process to collect practice examples, (ii) refining review processes and gathering further examples via national and regional teams (iii) maintenance of an accessible collection on the library platform.
Results: The project resulted in a searchable collection of 55 practice examples illustrating participatory approaches in public health practice. The collection shows diversity in terms of settings, population, focus and type of approach used to work with communities. A secondary outcome was the development of generic guidance and templates for further collections on public health topics.
Conclusions: This project illustrates how information on the implementation of community-centered approaches in real-life contexts can be gathered and disseminated through a transferable process. Having collections of practice examples supports knowledge exchange in public health as learning is shared.
Methods: The multidisciplinary project had three phases: (i) development and piloting a process to collect practice examples, (ii) refining review processes and gathering further examples via national and regional teams (iii) maintenance of an accessible collection on the library platform.
Results: The project resulted in a searchable collection of 55 practice examples illustrating participatory approaches in public health practice. The collection shows diversity in terms of settings, population, focus and type of approach used to work with communities. A secondary outcome was the development of generic guidance and templates for further collections on public health topics.
Conclusions: This project illustrates how information on the implementation of community-centered approaches in real-life contexts can be gathered and disseminated through a transferable process. Having collections of practice examples supports knowledge exchange in public health as learning is shared.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Journal of Public Health |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 30 Jun 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information: This project was jointly delivered by Public Health England (PHE) Health Improvement Directorate and PHE Knowledge and Library Services. Professor Jane South and Jude Stansfield were supported through Honorary Academic Contracts between PHE (now Office for Health Improvement and Disparities) and Leeds Beckett University. No external funding was received for this project.Open Access: This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com
Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Faculty of Public Health. All rights reserved.
Citation: Jane South, Tom Mapplethorpe, Rachel Gledhill, Wendy Marsh, Jude Stansfield, Sian Evans, Michelle Mancini, Helen Outhwaite, Learning from public health practice: the development of a library of community-centered practice examples, Journal of Public Health, 2022;, fdac065,
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdac065
