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We are pleased to invite you to join us at the 20th Annual Art and
Science of Health Promotion Conference.
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Under the theme "What Works Good, Better, Best in Health
Promotion? "the conference continues its long-standing tradition
of bringing together practitioners, scientists and
educators from across disciplines to learn and share their experience.
This conference will feature:
- Pre-conference Intensive Training Seminars
- Breakout sessions from the top scientists and practitioners in health
promotion
- Keynote addresses that will engage and inspire
- Peer presentations featuring panel discussions, research and case
studies
- And much more
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Join our
mailing list for program, schedule and hotel updates.
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What Works Good,
Better, Best In Health Promotion?
We have been at this for four decades. We are no longer infants, but we
are still adolescents. We have great ideas and energy; and we are
idealists. We do good work, but we still mess up sometimes.
Programs are established in business, community, clinical, school and commercial
fitness center settings. Good health outcomes are consistently achieved and
remarkable outcomes are some times achieved. Medical cost reduction is common.
However, we have
not reached consensus on the most effective methods. We do not know
the most time efficient or cost effective ways to improve health.
We do not know the best combination of programs to reduce medical
costs, or enhance productivity. We DO produce good outcomes;
we just don't know what works best
when, where or how. In short we do not know What Works Best.
We do have empirical evidence to support what works best in some limited
areas.
For example, we know that 300 minutes of talk therapy is optimal for smoking
cessation. More minutes than that does not seem to increase quit rates. We
know that a combination of talk therapy plus medication triples success rates
over either method by itself. Emerging research is showing that $200 seems
to be the optimal incentive for HRA participation and that the highest
participation rates occur when incentive are integrated into the health plans,
and the HRA is promoted with strong communication and strong management
support. We know, of course that a combination of more physical activity
plus less food leads to weight loss but we do not know how to motivate people to
do either one of those. We are good at reaching the people who make up the core
of our field: white, middle class, well educated, motivated people. We are
not so good at reaching people who are young or old, lower income, lower
education, ethnically and racially diverse or people in rural settings.
The good news, the GREAT news, is that we are going see rapid growth in the size
and number of health promotion programs in the next five years in the United
States and in the world. Furthermore, most of our new customers know so
little about what we do that they will accept what ever we offer. The bad
or the good news, depending on your perspective, is that unquestioned demand
will last only a few more years. If we do not figure out what works best, and
build those principles into all of our programs, we will loose this position of
high expectations and credibility into which we have worked so hard to move.
The 2010 Art and Science of Health Promotion Conference will answer some of the
questions about what works best, AND it will ask far more questions than it
answers. Figuring out what works best must be the focus of our field for
the next five years.
We need to ask ourselves:
What do we know vs. what do we suspect?
Why do we suspect what we suspect?
How do we know what we think we know?
Michael O'Donnell,
PhD, MBA, MPH
Editor in Chief, American Journal of Health Promotion
Program Chair, Art and Science of Health Promotion Conference |
Conference Sponsors
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