Health Promotion Evaluation Practices in the Americas

Louise Potvin has a doctorate in Public Health. She is professor at the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, Universite de Montreal and researcher at the Interdisciplinary Health Research Group. She holds the CHSRF/CIHR Chair on Community Approaches and Health Inequalities, which aims at documenting how public health interventions in support of local social development contribute to the reduction of health inequalities in urban settings. Her main research interests are the evaluation of community health promotion program and how local social environments are conducive of health. She was a member of the WHO Working Group on the evaluation of health promotion.

• Health Promotion Evaluation in the Americas.- Health Promotion in the Americas: Divergent and Common Ground.- Practical Dilemmas for Health Promotion Evaluation.- Issues in Health Promotion Evaluation: Fitting Evaluation Practice to Health Promotion.- Developing Evaluation Questions: Beyond the Technical Issues.- There Is More to Methodology than Method.- A Realist Approach to the Systematic Review.- From Knowledge to Action: Challenges and Opportunities for Increasing the Use of Evaluation in Health Promotion Policies and Practices.- Aligning Evaluation with Health Promotion Principles: Experiences from the Americas.- Figurative Thinking and Models: Tools for Participatory Evaluation.- Dilemmas in Health Promotion Evaluation: Participation and Empowerment.- Formative Evaluation and Community Empowerment Among American Indian/Alaska Natives.- Intersectoral Approaches to Health Promotion in Cities.- The Participatory Evaluation of Healthy Municipalities, Cities and Communities Initiatives in the Americas.- Evaluating Health Promotion in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: An Integrated Local Development Project.- Multi-strategy in the Evaluation of Health Promotion Community Interventions: An Indicator of Quality.- The Contribution of A Systematization Evaluative Approach to Implement A Health Promotion Project in Capela do Socorro, Sao Paulo, Brazil.- Issues in Evaluating Equity.- Context as a Fundamental Dimension of Health Promotion Program Evaluation.- Conclusion.- Aligning Evaluation Research and Health Promotion.- Aligning Evaluation Research and Health Promotion Values: Practices from the Americas.

From the reviews: "Potvin (U. de Montreal) and McQueen (CDC, Atlanta) edit these articles on the importance of health promotion efforts when it comes to maintaining high standards of living, and how public health intervention from the government may be more beneficial to a particular society than previously thought. ... Written for anyone involved with public health policy, this book also describes how these evaluations can be augmented by community research projects and policy initiatives." (SciTech Book News, December, 2008) "This book discusses the need to align the values of health promotion with the methodology of the research that evaluates health promotion programs. ... There are several potential audiences for this book, including graduate students, health promotion practitioners, public health decision makers, and evaluators from other fields of evaluation. ... This book fills an important void in the health promotion and evaluation literature." (Sylvia E. Furner, Doody's Review Services, January, 2009)