Background: Health literacy has been found to be the strongest predictor of health status; and without adequate health literacy, consumers may not understand/adequately evaluate the myriad of choices available. Older rural residents tend to use self-prescribed complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies and glean information about these…

Healing Presence is an innovative program designed to support health professions students at a small university in developing the personal resource of resilience in order to reduce and prevent burnout. Healthcare providers experience high rates of burnout which negatively impacts individual health and wellbeing as well as patient care quality,…

The Fit Family Challenge, a web-based healthy lifestyle program, was developed to motivate families to participate in more physical activity by tracking their behaviors and by providing them with educational materials and community events to attend with their families. This article is an account of the steps taken and the efforts needed to make a…

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention established School Health Profiles (Profiles) in 1996 to monitor school health policies and practices in secondary schools in states and school districts across the United States. Profiles is a system of surveys conducted biennially in even-numbered years and provides data on the following topics:…

This chapter proposes approaches for assessing learners and evaluating courses and curriculum that could be used by directors of health professions education (HPE) programs to determine the effectiveness and impact of their programs.

Policy, systems, and environmental change are now widely accepted as critical to sustaining improvements in community health. Evidence suggests that such systems-level change is most effective when driven by community-based partnerships. Yet, after more than three decades of building community-based partnership work, health inequities have…

This paper describes the development of a Dutch online programme called "Long Live Love+" focusing on positive, coercion-free relationships, contraception use, and the prevention of STIs, using the Intervention Mapping (IM) approach. All six steps of the approach were followed. Step 1 confirmed the need for a sexual health programme…

Purpose: Healthy Habits, Healthy U (HHHU) is a two-day school-based primary prevention cancer education program that uses interactive classroom presentations designed to help students learn how to reduce their cancer risks. HHHU is a collaboration between a local cancer hospital, school district and university. HHHU incorporates real cancerous and…

Purpose: To examine the enhancement of a university health course through the utilization of the CIPP Model as a means to develop an integrated service-learning component. Methods: The CIPP model was utilized in two concurrent semesters of an undergraduate health course in order to design and evaluate the implementation of a drug and alcohol…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of theory-based osteoporosis prevention programs on calcium and vitamin D intakes and osteoporosis health beliefs in young women. Methods: Women (N = 152) aged 19 to 25 years were randomly assigned to one of 3 groups: a brochure group (n = 51), a computer-tailored program group…

Peer education programs are a popular approach to preventing HIV infection among adolescents. While the programs show promise for effectively preventing HIV among the peers who are provided education, little evaluation research has been conducted to determine if the peer educators themselves experience knowledge, attitude, and behavior changes. A…

Treatment fidelity reporting practices are described for journals that published general and special education intervention research with high impact factors from 2005 through 2009. The authors reviewed research articles, reported the proportion of intervention studies that described fidelity measurement, detailed the components of fidelity…

Background: REBOUND is a novel media-based life skills and risk education programme developed for 14- to 25-year olds in school, university or youth group settings. This paper outlines the programme's rationale, curriculum and implementation. It provides information of relevance to researchers, programme developers and policymakers. Methods/design…

The prevalence of overweight children and adults has been increasing steadily over the past three decades. Behaviors related to diet and nutrition are often established in early childhood. Toddlers most often develop healthy eating habits through parent modeling. Due to the steady increase in obesity in children, there is a clear need for…

Purpose: Milwaukee has very high rates of risky sexual behavior and low rates of academic achievement among adolescents. Milwaukee school representatives partnered with researchers to create and implement an innovative project-based learning (PBL) high school health curriculum to engage students in school. This health education program, Project…