WHO-HPH Recognition Project on Fast-Track Implementation of Clinical Health Promotion

The project's background is the notion that patient centred clinical health promotion has been shown to significantly improve both outcomes and patient safety. Accordingly, the WHO describes health promotion as a key dimension of quality in hospitals, and the organization has developed standards on the topic in order to help hospital management and staff members to assess and improve the quality of health care and thereby achieve better health for patients, staff, and community. Even so, however, health promotion is still a very implicit part of nearly all quality standards on hospitals. Moreover, assessing hospitals departments' health promotion performance is still quite an unexplored area. On this basis, this project will test a new recognition process that uses the relevant WHO-HPH tools and standards to assess performance, by way of explicit documentation and evaluation of clinical health promotion activity. The project is deigned as a RCT, with a control group that undergoes the recognition process immediately and a control group that continue usual clinical routine. Then, after one year, the control group also begins the recognition process (= delayed start), while the Intervention group (=immediate-start) continues with the recognition process. Doing this allows for a great array of measurements, and hopefully the project will then show whether the recognition process really benefits implementation of health promotion in hospitals and health services, and also, if this really generates better health gains for patients and staff. The outcome measurements will be frequency of health promotion services delivered on smoking, excessive alcohol use, overweight, malnutrition, and physical activity to patients in need. Such services could for instance be motivational counselling and brief interventions, as well as intervention, rehabilitation and after treatment. Physical, mental, and social health status among patients and staff will be measured by short form (SF36).