Promising Practices
The Promising Practices database informs professionals and community members about documented approaches to improving community health and quality of life.
The ultimate goal is to support the systematic adoption, implementation, and evaluation of successful programs, practices, and policy changes. The database provides carefully reviewed, documented, and ranked practices that range from good ideas to evidence-based practices.
Learn more about the ranking methodology.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Alcohol & Drug Use, Children
The goal of this program is to educate children about health and to prevent substance abuse and violence.
The Great Body Shop shows that comprehensive substance abuse and violence prevention and health curriculums in schools for elementary and middle school students can improve knowledge, values, thinking skills, and behaviors around substance abuse and violence topic areas.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Alcohol & Drug Use, Children, Teens
The HeadOn program is designed to promote well-known protective factors based on both the social-influence model of drug use and a generalized skills-training model.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Children's Health, Children
The goal of Healthy Buddies is to increase health knowledge, health behaviors, and health attitudes in children in elementary school.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Immunizations & Infectious Diseases, Women, Racial/Ethnic Minorities, Urban
Healthy Love seeks to provide a safe, culturally tailored intervention for heterosexual black women to reduce their disproportionately high risk of transmitting and contracting HIV and other STDs. Healthy Love aims to encourage sexual abstinence, HIV testing, and receipt of test results; increase women's condom usage during vaginal sex with male partners; and reduce the number of women's sex partners and unprotected anal and vaginal sex with male partners. Healthy Love also seeks to improve HIV/STD knowledge, self-efficacy for using condoms, intentions to use condoms, and attitudes towards condoms.
Healthy Love increased participants' likelihood of using condoms, being tested for HIV, and receiving their test results. The intervention also reduced participants' self-described actions with male partners that can increase black women's risks for HIV infection.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Immunizations & Infectious Diseases, Adults, Racial/Ethnic Minorities
To educate the Chinese Canadian immigrant community on Hepatitis B knowledge and to promote Hepatitis B testing through ESL curriculum.
The Chinese immigrant population in North America has a rate of Hepatitis B infection that is 10 times higher than the general population's rate of approximately 0.5 percent. The Hepatitis B ESL curriculum is effective in increasing knowledge about Hepatitis B among Chinese immigrants in Canada.
Home-Delivered Meals Postdischarge From Heart Failure Hospitalization (GOURMET-HF) (Columbia University Medical Center, the Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs Health System, and the University of Michigan Health System)
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Heart Disease & Stroke, Adults, Women, Men, Older Adults
The goals of GOURMET-HF are to assess the safety of the intervention, including effects on cardiac biomarkers and rehospitalization burden.
Home-delivered DASH/SRD after HF hospitalization appear safe in selected patients and had favorable effects on HF clinical status and 30-day readmissions. The GOURMET-HF pilot study suggests that postdischarge nutritional support has the potential to improve HF symptoms and reduce readmissions
Filed under Good Idea, Education / Literacy
The Houston READ Commission's mission is to enrich the lives of adult Houstonians and their families by helping them achieve their full potential through literacy, and to contribute to a workforce that will ensure a strong economy and a promising future for the greater Houston area.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Mental Health & Mental Disorders, Children
The goal of this program is to teach children effective problem-solving skills.
Studies demonstrated that ICPS participants scored better than the control group on impulsiveness, inhibition, and total behavior problems; showed fewer high-risk behaviors than never-trained controls; showed improvement in positive, prosocial behaviors and decreases in antisocial behaviors; and performed better on standardized achievement tests.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Mental Health & Mental Disorders, Adults, Older Adults
The goal of IMPACT is to improve depression treatment by providing collaborative care to older adults.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Other Conditions
The goal of this study was to determine the effect Community Health Worker programs have on healthcare spending.
The studies show that CHW programs can help reduce emergency department visits and hospital use.