I Hung Five Posters This Week, is That My Health Promotion Done?' Developing a Framework for Health Promotion Outputs

Abstract

In health promotion, there is a pressing need for a reporting system, based on measures of output and worker productivity, to assist organisations funding health promotion and enable the management of health promotion activity to proceed on rational lines. Evidence exists to suggest some growth in government support for health promotion at both Commonwealth and state levels. Victoria, for example, has allocated funds to establish Regional Health Promotion Manager positions. Health promotion is explicitly mentioned in documents, such as the Primary Health Program Guidelines-1999/2000 (Co-ordinated Care Branch, 1999), with the expectation that 20% of community health resources are allocated to promoting better health. Currently, there are no standard criteria that can be used to guide, count or assess health promotion activities. This has implications for workers whose productivity can be questioned and for managers who lack guidance in staff deployment. For corporate management, an inability to measure health promotion is an accountability issue. Development of practical tools for determining whether funds allocated to health promotion are achieving health outcomes is a high priority. The purpose of this paper is to explore one aspect of concern in health promotion infrastructure: the absence of adequate output measures for health promotion and its impact on the implementation of health promotion at the local level. A review of the literature is used to generate the basis of a framework for measurement of health promotion outputs in relation to workers' activity levels.