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, Education, Teens
Goal: The mission of the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe program is to intervene in the lives of high-school dropouts and provide them with the values, life skills, education, and self-discipline necessary to succeed.
Impact: The National Guard Youth ChalleNGe program resulted in participants succeeding in several aspects of their lives compared to their control group counterparts. Program participants were more likely to have a GED certificate, more likely to have started college, and more likely to be working.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Community / Social Environment, Children, Teens, Women
Goal: New Beginnings promotes resilience in children after parental divorce by providing mothers and their children with group and individual-based sessions.
Impact: The New Beginnings program improves post-divorce adjustment outcomes such as interparental conflict, mother-child relationships, and coping strategies by targeting predictive behaviors.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Alcohol & Drug Use, Teens, Adults
Goal: The New York State Smokers' Quitline is a free and confidential service that provides effective stop smoking services to New Yorkers who want to stop smoking.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Diabetes, Rural
Goal: The overall goal is to reduce the prevalence of diabetes and improve the care of people with diabetes by improving provider education.
Impact: The results indicate that a half-day site visit with an experienced diabetologist can lead to sustained, improved glycemic and lipid control in previously-uncontrolled diabetic patients. The online iDose tool provides an easy way for healthcare providers to calculate insulin dosage.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Maternal, Fetal & Infant Health, Women, Urban
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: The Nurse Family Partnership Program has shown to improve pregnancy outcomes, improve child health and development, and increase economic self-sufficiency.
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 / 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 Evidence-Based Practice, Economy / Poverty, Families, Urban
Goal: The goal of this program was to help poor families build up their “human capital” and avoid long-term poverty.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Prevention & Safety, Urban
Goal: The goal of the Options/Opciones Project is to reduce or eliminate risky sexual and drug use behaviors of HIV-infected patients.
Impact: The Options/Opciones Project shows that a clinician-delivered HIV prevention intervention targeting HIV-infected patients can result in reductions in unprotected sex and that interventions of this kind should be integrated into routine HIV clinical care.
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.