Implementation of Evidence Based Health Promotion Programs in Community-Based Settings of South Florida: Lessons Learned

Background: The Healthy Aging Regional Collaborative (HARC) was created to reduce/eliminate the burden of preventable diseases in South Florida. By end of 2012, 29 member-agencies offered 1,341 evidence-based workshops at 362 sites and reached about 22,270 older adults aged 60 years or older in South Florida. Implementation of HARC programs provided with an opportunity to understand the effective and ineffective strategies encountered when translating evidence-based health promotion programs in community-based settings.

Methods: HARC agencies’ coordinators and managers were surveyed annually to ask specific questions about program implementation, benefits gained, and barriers of recruiting sites and participants. In addition, a focus group was conducted at end of the fifth year to discuss program implementation and to rank and discuss barriers/facilitators of HARC program implementation.    

Results: Agencies that implemented HARC programs reported that the ease of implementation was easy (40%) to difficult (10%). The top five barriers to implementation were cultural norms, inadequate participant interest, funding issues, geographic challenges, and lack of appropriate sites. Agencies experienced difficulties in recruiting new site (19%), new instructor (28.6%), and new participants (33%). Twelve effective and 11 ineffective characteristics of site, 16 successful and 9 unsuccessful characteristics of instructor, and 13 successful and 10 unsuccessful strategies to recruit participants were identified.

Conclusion: Despite barriers in implementing HARC programs, consistent themes related to successful implementation of programs emerged. Effective and ineffective characteristics of workshop site, instructor and participants were reported. Lessons learned from this study can be diffused to other settings that aim to implement evidence-based programs.