Book Reviews |
Evaluating Health Promotion: Practice and Methods
Edited by M Thorogood and Y Coombes. Published by Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-19-852880-9. Price: £27.50. 181 pp.
This publication, edited by Margaret Thorogood, Professor of Epidemiology at Warwick Medical School and Yolande Coombes, a regional researcher in the Department of Population Services International, Nairobi, Kenya, details a toolbox approach to evaluate health promotion. The editors bring together qualitative and quantitative methods with the focus on process as well as outcome. Their approach presents health promotion as a multi-disciplinary activity requiring a range of methods for evaluation.
This book aims to assist students and practitioners involved in health promotion to choose and implement accurate, reliable and evidence-based methods for their health promotion projects.
This is a clearly written, concise publication of 181 pages with helpful key point summaries at the end of each chapter. The volume progresses through a range of chapters divided into three sections. The first two sections will be familiar to occupational physicians detailing, firstly, the history of health promotion and health promotion evaluation and, secondly, providing a concise coverage of methods of evaluation and discussion around the advantages and disadvantages of the various research methods.
In my view, section three will prove of most benefit and interest to occupational physicians and, in particular, to trainees as they work through their Record of In-training Assessment (RITA) training requirements. This section examines the evaluation of social marketing and the problems of evaluating community participation together with community development initiatives in health promotion. It moves then to discuss the ethical concepts pivotal to health promotion and resolving the difficulties involved in promoting mass media campaigns. While not specific to workplace health promotion, the practical examples given allow the reader to relate the concepts to everyday occupational health practice.
Those present at this year's Annual Scientific Meeting will have heard Mansel Aylward's Thackrah Lecture titled ‘Changing the Culture about Work, Health and Inactivity: the Pivotal Role of Occupational Health’. This book will prove helpful to the occupational health practitioner seeking to meet the challenge laid down by Aylward's lecture. It will assist in ensuring effective day-to-day provision of health promotion as well as, importantly, developing our methods of evaluating our health promotion activities, thereby encouraging us to make further contribution to the research evidence base.
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