Health awareness days: Empirical evidence to support the craze?

This presentation will deliver the results of the first systematic synthesis of research and scholarship about health awareness days. The current state of evidence and strategies for evaluation will be discussed.

Background: Awareness days are a common health promotion strategy. Nearly 200 health awareness days, weeks, and months are on the U.S. National Health Observances calendar and over 145 awareness day bills have been introduced in U.S. Congress since 2005. Despite the ubiquity of health awareness days, a synthesis of research and scholarship about the intervention strategy does not exist.

Methods: We obtained the full-text of all PubMed articles that mentioned “awareness day(s)” in the title/abstract and conducted a content analsis with a focus on evidence of effectiveness and theoretical foundations of health awareness days.  

Results: We identified 80 articles published between 1979-2015. The vast majority were commentaries and editorials that functioned to raise awareness about awareness days. Only six articles presented empirical results of an outcome evaluation; none evaluated an awareness day implemented in the U.S. Short-term changes in knowledge were the primary outcomes assessed and pre-/post-survey designs were most common. None of the articles explcitly identified a theory of health promotion or conceptual model through which the awareness day would improve health outcomes.

Conclusion: Awareness days have not been held to an appropriate level of scrutiny given the scale at which they have been embraced. There is a need for guidance to align a widely utilized health promotion strategy with standards of evidence-supported health promotion practice.