Promising Practices
The Promising Practices database informs professionals and community members about documented approaches to improving community health and quality of life.
The ultimate goal is to support the systematic adoption, implementation, and evaluation of successful programs, practices, and policy changes. The database provides carefully reviewed, documented, and ranked practices that range from good ideas to evidence-based practices.
Learn more about the ranking methodology.
Filed under Effective Practice, Health / Immunizations & Infectious Diseases
Goal: The goal of this program is to prevent the spread of this illness and protect human lives.
Filed under Effective Practice, Environmental Health / Energy & Sustainability
Goal: Napa's goal was to save up to 15 percent in electricity usage in 2001.
Filed under Effective Practice, Education / Educational Attainment, Children
Goal: It is the mission of the Fred G. Acosta Job Corps Center to create a pathway of economic success for disadvantaged youth through a career service delivery system. The program strives to teach marketable skills in a safe and supportive setting, and to find meaningful employment for students when they leave the program.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Children's Health, Children
Goal: The goal of the FRIENDS Programs is to teach cognitive-behavioral skills to reduce anxiety in elementary school students who are or were exposed to violence.
Impact: The FRIENDS Programs and specific studies of them indicate that school-based anxiety prevention programs can increase standardized mathematics achievement scores, decrease life stressors, and reduce victimization by community violence in children.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Immunizations & Infectious Diseases, Women, Racial/Ethnic Minorities, Urban
Goal: Healthy Love seeks to provide a safe, culturally tailored intervention for heterosexual black women to reduce their disproportionately high risk of transmitting and contracting HIV and other STDs. Healthy Love aims to encourage sexual abstinence, HIV testing, and receipt of test results; increase women's condom usage during vaginal sex with male partners; and reduce the number of women's sex partners and unprotected anal and vaginal sex with male partners. Healthy Love also seeks to improve HIV/STD knowledge, self-efficacy for using condoms, intentions to use condoms, and attitudes towards condoms.
Impact: Healthy Love increased participants' likelihood of using condoms, being tested for HIV, and receiving their test results. The intervention also reduced participants' self-described actions with male partners that can increase black women's risks for HIV infection.
Filed under Effective Practice, Environmental Health / Toxins & Contaminants, Children, Adults, Families
Goal: The goal of the Healthy Places Coalition is to advance public health involvement in land-use and transportation planning in order to ensure that all neighborhoods in California promote the opportunity to live a healthy life.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Heart Disease & Stroke
Impact: The Community Preventive Services Task Force (CPSTF) recommends tailored pharmacy-based adherence interventions for cardiovascular disease prevention. Evidence shows interventions delivered by pharmacists in community and health system pharmacies increased the proportion of patients who reported taking medications as prescribed. The CPSTF also finds these interventions are cost-effective for cardiovascular disease prevention.
Filed under Effective Practice, Health / Heart Disease & Stroke, Adults
Goal: The goal of the Hearts for Life program is to increase knowledge of cardiovascular risk factors and encourage healthy cardiovascular behaviors.
Filed under Good Idea, Health / Alternative Medicine, Older Adults
Goal: HeartStrings aims to enhance the quality of life for individuals with special needs. Through regularly-recurring, interactive sessions, the MSO’s Rhapsodie Quartet addresses the physical, emotional, cognitive, and social needs of hundreds of individuals each year in a comfortable and familiar setting.
HeartStrings mission statement is as follows:
1) To enhance the quality of life of underserved populations through live, interactive, and exceptional quality musical experiences that are informed by the American Music Therapy Association’s Standards of Practice.
2) To bring meaningful arts experiences directly to participants in a comfortable and
familiar setting.
3) To provide a valuable resource for facilities that serve aging populations, adults with dementia, and individuals with disabilities, or long-term illnesses.
Impact: HeartStrings has reached over 3,200 individuals with disabilities, long-term illness, and assisted-living needs, as well as aging adults with dementia since its start in 2006.
HIV/STD Risk Reduction Interventions for African American and Latino Adolescent Girls (Philadelphia)
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Adolescent Health, Teens, Women, Racial/Ethnic Minorities, Urban
Goal: The goal of this intervention was to reduce self-reported unprotected sexual intercourse among African American and Latino adolescent girls.
Impact: Skill-based HIV/STD interventions can improve condom-use and reduce sexual risk behaviors, along with STD rates, among African American and Latino teen girls in clinical settings.