Evaluation of Public Health Wales Good Practice Scheme

 

The Public Health Wales Good Practice Scheme, launched in 2010, aims to recognise and support good practice in initiatives in the fields of nutrition, physical activity, mental health promotion and sexual health and to support the development of knowledge-based database. The Public Health Wales Good Practice Scheme was piloted before being launched at regional workshops in the autumn of 2010. Public Health Wales set a target to receive 50 applications by September 2011; however, only half that number was received by this date. It was therefore decided to conduct an evaluation of the Public Health Wales Good Practice Scheme to analyse the benefits and barriers of the application process in order to determine why the scheme has not been as popular as hoped.

The aims of the evaluation were to identify the members’ awareness of the Good Practice Scheme and to describe members’ views of the Good Practice Scheme and of the application process. 152 Network Members, from across all four Public Health Wales Networks (including the Physical Activity and Nutrition Network) responded to the questionnaire. Of these responses, 8% had applied for the Public Health Wales Good Practice Scheme, 14% had considered and were going to apply, 12% had considered and were not going to apply and 63% had not considered applying.

The evaluation identified, amongst other things, that:

• there is currently a low awareness of the Scheme;
• the initiatives that applied were focussed on obtaining the top ‘Good Practice Award’;
• the criteria itself received some criticism in that it may be too rigorous;
• and the main reason that practitioners are not applying for the PHWGPS is due to the perception of the application taking a lot of time to complete.

Work is now underway within the Public Health Wales Networks to address the issues raised by the evaluation and progress the development of the Public Health Good Practice Scheme further. Even though the evaluation has now been concluded, we are always open to feedback and suggestions regarding the Scheme, so please do get in touch.

Download Public Health Wales Good Practice Scheme Evaluation