Community and/or organizational capacity are viewed as essential to enable and sustain health promotion initiatives that remain effective and relevant for communities. Capacity gets beyond the mere application of pre-designed health promotion programs in the short term to the integration of health promotion knowledge and skills across organizations and communities for the long term. Heart Health Nova Scotia is a Canadian research team conducting research on capacity. Capacity serves as an intermediate outcome and the measure of progress or change toward improved community heart health. The research team applied a community development approach to engaging in research, and fifteen diverse community organizations participate on a regional coalition for heart health. Representatives from the regional coalition were instrumental in defining capacity for heart health promotion, and selecting data collection tools and methods. A mixed method approach to data collection was used to estimate organizational capacity for heart promotion defined by three dimensions:
1) Existing programs and policies for heart health, 2) The process for program/policy development, implementation and evaluation, 3) The environment (both external and internal) supportive of (or challenging to) heart health promoting activities
This paper describes the process of establishing a definition of organizational capacity for the research, describes the mixed method approach to measuring capacity, and presents results of estimating capacity for heart health promotion in selected organizations in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Learning Objectives: 1) To describe the collaborative process of establishing a measure of organizational capacity for heart health promotion. 2) To describe the multiple method approach used to collect data on organizational capacity. 3) To show results used to describe a baseline measure of organizational capacity for selected organizations
Keywords: Community-Based Health Promotion, Organizational Change
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: None
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.