Principles of Public Health Practice/Assessment of a Public Health Intervention

For this assignment you will need to find and assess an Indigenous community-based public health intervention report from 2006-2013. You are to determine its background, rationale, ethics and how effective and/or efficient the intervention was. For guidance, refer to Evaluating Australian Indigenous community health promotion initiatives: a selective review and use it to form your own evaluation criteria (See Fig 1: Indicators... and page 4 for ethical guidelines for instance). If you need more direction in finding an intervention, consider areas 1, 2, 3 and 8 of the Closing the Nutrition and Physical Activity Gap in Victoria report.

This assignment should be 2000 words and makes up 40% of your overall assessment.

Specific instructions

If you need more support in this assignment, consider following these instructions

Obtain a copy of the following review article: Mikhailovich, K., Morrison, P., and Arabena, K. (2007) Evaluating Australian Indigenous community health promotion interventions: a selective review. Rural and Remote Health 7:746 (Online).
Read carefully through their review of the guidelines for research and the design and practice of evaluations, as well as their outlining of the characteristics of various health promotion evaluations associated with Indigenous peoples and communities.
Review the various summaries of their findings relating to interventions and pay particular attention to their outline of evaluation methods, outcomes and indicators of change.
Summarise the key points from the guidelines, characteristics, indicators of change and the recommendations of the authors. This is the beginning of your criteria for analysis.
Review an example by obtaining a copy of the Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations’ Aboriginal nutrition and physical activity strategy, Closing the Nutrition and Physical Activity Gap in Victoria
Read through the information on pages 8-20 and note key issues and recommendations. Pay particular attention to the actions areas, potential outcomes and partners. Briefly review the first three action areas as well as the last (Areas 1, 2, 3 and 8). Develop your own criteria of effectiveness, efficiency and equity from your reading of this material and the material from the review article.
Select one of the remaining areas as the focus of your assessment of a public health intervention. Using a search engine, find an intervention in your focus area that meets or exceeds the criteria that you have created for evaluating the intervention. (The intervention must be related to Aboriginal and Torres Islander peas outlined in the Mikhailovich et al review. The timeframe for the report on the intervention must be from 2006-2013. The intervention might have taken place earlier than this. However, the report must have been written within this timeframe.
Use the following to structure your analysis:

Structural guidance

Your assessment should include the following structural sections:

Intervention title
Description
Background
Rationale
Assessment

Effectiveness
Efficiency
Equity
Acceptability
Affordability
Accessibility

Conclusion

Summarise main points of this assessment
Recommendation of how the intervention could be improved

References

Further advice

You may use headings. However, these should not take the place of good introductory, transition and connecting sentences to guide the reader through your document. The writing should be formal in tone (e.g., no contractions, third person, avoidance of unfounded generalisations and so forth). Again, use APA 6 for in-text referencing and your reference section. You are expected to develop complete paragraphs (one main idea in a key sentence and sufficient subordinate sentences which are well-referenced to provide sufficient evidence of your claims or assertions).
As with all real work in the field, you will be assessed for your ability to discern what needs to be said for each of these points in relation to your whole assessment. As different people will focus on different issues, it is your responsibility to ensure that you take the reader through a well-constructed, reasoned and evidenced assessment of a public health intervention. The more you read and write in the discipline, the better able you will be to discern the complex skills and strategies required to do well in this regard.
Please use a cover sheet that provides your name/id number, the subject code, your tutor and the date. Refer to the document “What Do These Marks Mean” for other aspects such as spacing, margins, font size and type, and so on.