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 / Maternal, Fetal & Infant Health, Women
Goal: The program has three primary goals:
1) to improve pregnancy outcomes by promoting health-related behaviors;
2) to improve child health, development and safety by promoting competent care-giving; and
3) to enhance parent life-course development by promoting pregnancy planning, educational achievement, and employment.
The program also has two secondary goals: to enhance families’ material support by providing links with needed health and social services, and to promote supportive relationships among family and friends.
Impact: Evaluations of the program have shown that women who were visited by nurses had significantly better outcomes than those who did not in terms of measures such as maternal health, maternal life-course development, child health and safety, and adolescent measures of delinquency.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Children's Health, Children, Urban
Goal: The goal of this intervention is to improve motor skills and fitness in young children. Fitness and motor skills development early in life can lay the foundation for successful lifelong physical activity participation.
Impact: A short-duration lifestyle intervention can have a lasting effect on children's fitness and motor skills development.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Physical Activity, Children
Goal: The goal of the program is to provide elementary schools with a low-cost, non-invasive curriculum to educate elementary school children on how to read nutrition labels, differentiate between marketing versus reality, and select healthier food options.
Impact: Nutrition Detectives shows that a low-cost, non-invasive educational program based around downloadable videos, presentations, and materials can improve young students' and their parents' ability to make healthier food and nutrition choices.
Filed under Effective Practice, Community / Crime & Crime Prevention, Children, Urban
Goal: The goals of the program are to carry out a comprehensive strategy to apprehend and prosecute offenders who carry firearms, to put others on notice that offenders face certain and serious punishment for carrying illegal firearms, and to prevent youths from following the same criminal path.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Children's Health, Children, Urban
Goal: The goal of Parent Connext is to support parents in reducing and/or preventing toxic stress in the family and help children develop critical life skills and coping skills. Recent studies have found that up to 50% of health outcomes are attributable to social and economic factors and that lifetime costs associated with child maltreatment are comparable to other costly healthcare conditions such as stroke or type 2 diabetes. Moreover, 4 in 5 physicians report lacking confidence in their ability to meet patients’ social needs, which can impede their ability to provide high quality medical care. As a result, interventions that target parents’ social needs may have important implications for reducing healthcare costs and have the added benefit of enabling physicians to provide high-quality care to their patients.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Community / Social Environment, Children
Goal: The goal of PCIT is to improve the behavior of children suffering from conduct disorders by strengthening the parent-child relationship and teaching parenting and discipline skills.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Community / Social Environment, Children, Families
Goal: The goal of this program is to teach effective parenting practices in order to promote healthy child adjustment.
Impact: Immediate changes for parents include improved positive parenting practices and reduced family coercion. Benefits to these parenting practices, in turn, have been found to result in reductions in child behavior problems and parental depression.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Community / Social Environment, Children, Families
Goal: The goal of this program is to reduce child behavior problems and delinquency and substance abuse among adolescents, to improve parenting knowledge and skills, and to strengthen the relationship between adolescent and parent.
Impact: Findings from studies show an association between Parenting Wisely participation and improvements in family problem solving, family roles, family involvement, parenting self-efficacy, parenting sense of competence, and decreased adolescent violent behavior.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Oral Health, Children, Families, Urban
Goal: The goal of this intervention was to involve pediatricians to help reduce rates of early childhood caries.
Impact: The multifaceted ECC intervention was associated with increased provider knowledge and counseling, and significantly attenuated incidence of ECC, showing that similar interventions could have the potential to make a significant public health impact on reducing ECC among young children.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Cancer, Adults, Rural
Goal: The goal of this program is to improve communication between providers and patients about colorectal cancer screening.