Innovative community health initiative evaluation funding renewed
Renewed funding to continue the evaluation of an innovative community-led health initiative will further develop ground-breaking insights and improvements being generated in ten communities nationwide.
Dr Anna Matheson, senior lecturer in Health Policy in the School of Health—Te Kura Tātai Hauora, is the lead investigator of a cross-institution team granted $1.5 million by the Ministry of Health to continue the evaluation of Healthy Families NZ. The evaluation has been running for seven years alongside the initiative.
“The funding will allow further lessons from this unique initiative to be built upon over time. It will also deepen the insights gathered into effective community action and change to improve health, wellbeing, and equity in different communities across Aotearoa”, says Dr Matheson.
The evidence-based initiative aims to improve people’s health where they live, learn, work, and play by taking a ‘systems change’ approach to preventing chronic disease and improving wellbeing.
“The Healthy Families NZ teams are building on, and connecting, what is already going on in communities to make local environments healthier.
They are doing some amazing mahi – initiatives that grow opportunities for kids to play, promoting local voices in urban planning and procurement decisions, advocating for smokefree, safe alcohol and healthy food policies and practices, building more resilient and secure food systems, improving relationships between service providers, restoring local stories and narratives that reconnect social and natural histories, and centring matauranga Māori.”
Dr Matheson says the Healthy Families NZ teams’ connections, skills, and local communication capacity have also proved invaluable throughout the pandemic.
“They have really stepped up to help coordinate and reach people in need of food, money, medicine, and accurate information.”
The community-based teams are housed within diverse Lead Providers (Māori and Pacific providers and social change organisations, Local Councils and Sports Trusts) in ten localities across Aotearoa – Far North, Waitākere, South Auckland, East Cape, Whanganui, Rotorua, Hutt Valley, Christchurch, Invercargill, and most recently, Waikato.
Key to the adaptive nature of initiative has been a collaborative and partnership approach to service commissioning between the local teams and the Ministry of Health.
“An important enabler of this local action has been the teams' relationships with the Ministry of Health which have been untraditional. They have been close, timely, reciprocal, and responsive. They have been honest about values, mindful of resources and information, and careful about trust building. How, and with whom, power is shared is being made explicit.
But, this is still only one small pocket of better community and policy relations. And spreading this practice more widely is proving hard. The mindset that community action is a soft – unscientific – vehicle for change is pervasive.”
The evaluation uses an innovative case-comparison design in response to the diverse community contexts involved, and the adaptive nature of the initiative.
“As well examining the effectiveness of Healthy Families NZ, the evaluation has contributed to improvements in the way the initiative has been implemented. The continued funding will enable the knowledge base to be grown around the role that whānau and communities can play in advocating for, and acting on, local needs to contribute to better health and wellbeing outcomes.”
Additional team members from the School of Health include Dr Rebecca Gray and Tali Uia, a research assistant and Master of Health student.
The next evaluation report is expected to be published in August this year.