Increasing the Writing Capacity and Dissemination of Evaluation Findings Among US Public Health Practitioners Funded to Improve Cardiovascular Health

Details

• Alternative Title:
  J Public Health Manag Pract
• Personal Author:
  Scott, Amber ; Bostic, Myles ; Sreedhara, Meera ; McAtee, Jennifer ; Minaya-Junca, Jasmin ; Vaughan, Marla
• Description:
  Context: ; Contributing to the evidence base, by disseminating findings through written products such as journal articles, is a core competency for public health practitioners. Disseminating practice-based evidence that supports improving cardiovascular health is necessary for filling literature gaps, generating health policies and laws, and translating evidence-based strategies into practice. However, a gap exists in the dissemination of practice-based evidence in public health. Public health practitioners face various dissemination barriers (eg, lack of time and resources, staff turnover) which, more recently, were compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. ; Program: ; The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention (DHDSP) partnered with the National Network of Public Health Institutes to implement a multimodal approach to build writing capacity among recipients funded by three DHDSP cooperative agreements. This project aimed to enhance public health practitioners’ capacity to translate and disseminate their evaluation findings. ; Implementation: ; Internal evaluation technical assistance expertise and external subject matter experts helped to implement this project and to develop tailored multimodal capacity-building activities. These activities included online peer-to-peer discussion posts, virtual writing workshops, resource documents, one-to-one writing coaching sessions, an online toolkit, and a supplemental issue in a peer-reviewed journal. ; Evaluation: ; Findings from an informal process evaluation demonstrate positive results. Most participants were engaged and satisfied with the project’s activities. Across eight workshops, participants reported increased knowledge (≥94%) and enhanced confidence in writing (≥98%). The majority of participants (83%) reported that disseminating evaluation findings improved program implementation. Notably, 30 abstracts were submitted for a journal supplement and 23 articles were submitted for consideration. ; Discussion: ; This multimodal approach serves as a promising model that enhances public health practitioners’ capacity to disseminate evaluation findings during times of evolving health needs.
• Subjects:
  • Humans
  • United States
  • Public Health
  • Writing
  • COVID-19
  • Information Dissemination
  • Capacity Building
  • Cardiovascular Diseases
  • SARS-CoV-2
  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S.
• Keywords:
  • capacity building
  • dissemination
  • evaluation
  • public health practitioners
  • technical assistance
• Source:
  J Public Health Manag Pract. 30:S6-S14
• Pubmed ID:
  38870354
• Pubmed Central ID:
  PMC11194712
• Document Type:
  Journal Article
• Funding:
  CC999999/ImCDC/Intramural CDC HHSUnited States/
• Volume:
  30
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/158153/cdc_158153_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 383.49 KB]
• Collection(s):
  CDC Public Access
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha256:41723868db59ead4a7784025aabecdbc6f33911e9981ac34c8ed2a4b9b949ce7