Coordinated action checklist: a tool for partnerships to facilitate and evaluate community health promotion

Coordinated action through partnerships is a core approach in community health promotion to deal with the multidimensionality of today's health and societal issues. The number of partnerships is increasing. However, facilitation and evaluation of partnerships is hampered by the lack and/or nonuse of feasible tools. As a consequence, health promotion through partnerships is not optimally facilitated and evaluated. This article describes the development and piloting of a tool and guidelines to facilitate and evaluate coordinated action in community health promotion. The initial development of the tool was based on relevant literature, a conceptual framework to support social environments for health, and an inventory of existing tools. Appreciative inquiry principles contributed to the formulation of items. The result, a checklist for coordinated action, was further developed and assessed for usability in six different partnerships: a national program, an academic collaborative and four local partnerships. Results of the checklist were cross- checked and discussed with partners. Piloting the checklist resulted in a feasible tool helpful to partnerships because of its ability to generate actionable knowledge. The checklist enables the facilitation and evaluation of community health promotion partnerships that differ in context and level (both local and national), phase of the program and topics addressed. Cross-checking and discussing results with partners and triangulation with interview data increases the reliability of the results of the checklist. Piloting in multiple cases contributes to the checklist's external validity. (Global Health Promotion, 2010; 17(3): pp. 17-28)