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 Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Physical Activity, Children, Urban
To promote water consumption with an educational and environmental intervention in elementary schools of deprived urban areas to prevent overweight.
This program shows that environmental and educational, school-based interventions can have effective impact in the prevention of overweight among children in elementary school, even in a population from socially-deprived areas.
Filed under Good Idea, Health / Cancer, Women, Racial/Ethnic Minorities
The goal of this program is to encourage low-income African American and Hispanic women to seek early breast and cervical cancer screening.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Education / Literacy, Children, Adults, Families
The mission of Reach Out and Read is to help prepare young children to succeed in school, by partnering with physicians to encouraging parents and children to read aloud together.
Reach Out and Read improves children's language development by 3-6 months and improves language ability with increased exposure to the program.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Mental Health & Mental Disorders, Teens
The goal of ReachOut Central (ROC) is to improve mental health among young people through an online gaming service by teaching them the practical coping skills for dealing with major stressors in life, ranging from issues such as alcohol use to psychological distress.
The aggregate results of this statistical analysis point to ReachOut Central's potential to impact and improve certain factors, such as coping ability, but also to relatively unexplored gender-dependent outcomes for other factors like alcohol consumption.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Other Conditions
The goal of this study is to determine how many Community Health Workers (CHW) would be needed to reduce emergency department (ED) visits and associated hospitalizations among their assigned patients to be cost-neutral from a payer's perspective.
This study adds significant knowledge to the existing literature on CHW programs, and particularly provides critical information to payers that can be used for making decisions on appropriate payment models
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Children's Health, Children, Racial/Ethnic Minorities, Urban
The goal of the Reducing Environmental Triggers of Asthma intervention is to improve asthma control by removing environmental allergens and irritants from the home.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Community / Governance, Children
The goal of requiring that all Connecticut children receive at least 1 dose of influenza vaccine each year to attend a licensed child care program and preschool setting is to reduce influenza transmission and decrease influenza-associated hospitalizations statewide.
Requiring vaccination for admission into a licensed child care program or preschool program has helped to increase vaccination rates among children in Connecticut and reduced serious morbidity from influenza statewide.
Filed under Effective Practice, Health / Adolescent Health, Teens, Men, Urban
The mission of the Rikers Health Advocacy Program is to provide an intensive AIDS education designed to reduce HIV risk behaviors for incarcerated adolescent male drug users.
Filed under Effective Practice, Health / Physical Activity, Children
To create a sustainable school lunch program that incorporated healthier food items by leveraging the combined efforts of several school districts.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Children's Health, Children, Families, Urban
The goal of Romp & Chomp is to increase healthy eating and physical activity in order to reduce overweight and obesity in children less than 5 years of age.
The Romp & Chomp program was a multistrategy and multisetting community based intervention designed to reduce childhood obesity by encouraging healthy eating and active play. The program results have shown that Romp & Chomp, working alongside other health promotion programs, was successful in reducing the prevalence of childhood obesity.