Intervention development: regional health coordination

Since 2017, the »Tut gut!« Gesundheitsvorsorge GmbH has implemented a pioneering project to best anchor health promotion and prevention in the communities of Lower Austria through the ""Regional Health Coordination"" program. The program consists of two approaches: First to enable people to provide professional health promotion in a regional setting and second to engage communities to create supportive environments for health promotion and prevention. Together with the Danube University Krems, NÖGUS developed an extra-occupational postgraduate study course “Regional Health Coordinator, AE”. This course is based on the CompHP Core Competencies Framework for Health Promotion and the experience of health promotion practitioners. For communities that are willing to implement a Regional Health Coordinator, NÖGUS takes over the tuition fees in full and the later personnel costs in part. There has to be a contractual agreement between the municipality and NÖGUS, that has to be signed after a municipal council resolution. The first round of the program (course and accompanying measures) ended in February 2020. As can be expected with a pilot project, there were many lessons learned during the implementation process. The aim of this project is therefore to develop an optimized program to optimize its impact. For this purpose, the project team will implement a genuine document analysis (Döring, Bortz, & Pöschl, 2016), create a vulnerability analysis, record the recommendations of external party experts, prepare a proposal for change, and documents the revised ""Regional Health Coordination"" in a written program description. This project is implemented in cooperation with the “Tut gut!” Gesundheitsvorsorge GmbH with funding from the Lower Austrian Health and Social Fund (NÖGUS). Döring, N., Bortz, J., & Pöschl, S. (2016). Forschungsmethoden und Evaluation in den Sozial- und Humanwissenschaften (5. vollständig überarbeitete, aktualisierte und erweiterte Auflage ed.). Berlin Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. Grillich, L., Rameder, C., & Kappl, A. (2018). Regional Health Coordinators: Community Capacity Building for Health Promotion and Prevention. Eur J Public Health, 28(suppl_4). doi:10.1093/eurpub/cky213.428