Professionals' Perspectives on Facilitating and Hindering Factors of Implementing Health Promotion Programs in Organizational Settings: a Qualitative Comparative Study in Austria

Background:

In the field of health promotion, the 'setting approach' has gained increased attention over the last decades. Following this approach, organizations and governments are urged to invest in health and health promotion. However, the dissatisfaction with the broad definition of the term 'setting' has grown. As many health promotion programs are carried out in organizational settings, substantial work has been done on how to acknowledge organizational factors in designing and implementing health promotion programs. Organizational settings differ from others because they can also address their clients as beneficiaries of health promotion programs, also known as 'client-oriented health promotion'. Among the most prominent organizational settings for health promotion are schools and hospitals, and more recently, long-term care (LTC-) facilities. However, dissemination and implementation of client-oriented health promotion in organizational settings seem to be very challenging. Most approaches dealing with barriers to health promotion implementation in schools, hospitals, and LTC-facilities rarely reflect the specific organizational characteristics. This negligence constitutes both, a research gap in the setting approach and in the design of health promotion practice. Hence, the aim of this study is to explore professionals' (teachers', health professionals', care aids') views and attitudes that influence the implementation of client-oriented health promotion programs between schools, hospitals, and LTC-facilities in Austria.

Methods:

With that aim in mind, the investigators chose a comparative qualitative design. Semi-structured interviews will be conducted with 90 professionals (30 in schools, 30 in hospitals, and 30 in LTC-facilities). In addition, non-participant observations as well as an extensive document analysis in each setting will be undertaken. The data will be analyzed by thematic analysis. Comparisons within as well as between the organizational settings will be conducted using selected categories.

Discussion:

To date, this study is the first of its kind that compares results of individual semi-structured interviews between different organizational settings. This study investigates professionals' views and attitudes on facilitating and hindering factors of implementing client-oriented health promotion programs and thus will provide a solid basis for future research activities and evaluation studies in the field of health promotion implementation.