The English Department of Health today unveiled it strategic approach to apply social marketing throughout the country's health promotion efforts. From the home page:
On 26 June 2006, the first National Review of Social Marketing for Health in England, 'It's our Health' was launched [summary report - pdf file]. This review was commissioned by the Department of Health as part of its delivery of the Choosing Health White Paper commitments. The report sets out its findings, as well as strategic and operational recommendations on how social marketing can be applied to improve the impact and effectiveness of health promotion in England, at national and local levels. These recommendations will provide a framework for the first National Social Marketing Strategy for Health in England.
The new approach to promote health is a result of three influences. The first is research
demonstrating that current approaches to public health would not achieve the
agreed upon targets. It is also believed that the government has to adopt a customer-centered approach
and abandon the paternalistic ‘nanny state’ position it has been accused of
having for many years. Finally, there is growing awareness of the evidence and experience
base of social marketing approaches to improve health (see the reviews at the National Social Marketing Strategy Site).
A small group of us got a sneak peak of the launch at the USF social marketing conference last Friday. Jeff French and John Bromley walked us through the drivers, methodology, process and objectives for the adoption of the social marketing approach throughout the Department of Health – not as ‘another’ approach to health promotion activities, but as the central guiding force in all DH efforts.
The Strategic Aim: Increase the impact and effectiveness of national and local health-related programs and campaigns by ensuring that social marketing principles are adopted and systematically applied.
Strategic Objectives:
- Put the consumer at the center of all health program development and delivery.
- Mobilize available assets and develop a diverse resource base to increase their effectiveness and impact.
- Enhance the leadership, priority-setting and development of expert commissioning roles.
- Build capacity and skills to integrate social marketing within existing intervention methods.
- Reconfigure research and evaluation approaches so that they directly assess movement towards national behavioral goals and better capture lessons learned from interventions.
Jeff and John walked us through a very deliberate and thoughtful process that has unfolded over the past two years. Two noteworthy points were the meeting of the five largest food retailers/producers with the Prime Minister to consider the question ‘How are you going to help us improve people’s health’ (rather than signing 'good intention' documents with a former one) and the finding that exactly 0.02% of the National Health Services research budget was for program evaluation activities to answer the real-world question: What Works? I wonder what the percentage is for the US health research and evaluation budget within the DHHS?
The sense we were left with is that this is a bold initiative that has involved and been embraced at the highest levels of the relevant Cabinet and other government officials. They have also thought about and preemptively addressed efforts to water down the effort through ‘superficial adoption’ practices (adopt the language but not its discipline; only apply it to operational issues and not policy formulation, strategy development and specific behaviorally-focused interventions).
This is a model for systemically improving the nature, delivery and effectiveness of health promotion programs around the world. More information about the process will be appearing in the Fall issue of Social Marketing Quarterly.
Technorati Tags: Health Promotion, National Health Policy, Social Marketing
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