Session: Practice Change: The Missing Link Between Policy and Behavior (Society for Prevention Research 21st Annual Meeting)

Prevention-focused initiatives increasingly incorporate policy efforts in order to facilitate system-wide changes that can reduce health risks and promote healthy behavior. Yet formal policies themselves do not achieve these goals unless translated into practice change.  Practice changes such as response protocols and tool kits, serve as informal policies that can support behavior changes, shift community norms and build support for the adoption of formal policy.  Practice change may precede the adoption of formal policy change and is often more feasible. However, formal policies are ultimately needed to ensure accountability and institutionalize practice change.  This session will describe the role of informal policies that support practice change and approaches by which organizations work to support both formal and informal policies.  

The first paper, “Start Where You Are, Do What You Can: Using Policy and Practice Change to Support Teen Dating Violence Prevention,” describes how grantees in a national initiative to prevent teen dating violence worked to enhance formal policies while simultaneously implementing practice change strategies that both achieved short-term impacts and served as groundwork for eventual adoption of formal policy.

The second paper, “Lessons for Moving Upstream:  Strategies for Community Efforts to Affect Policy and Environmental Change to Reduce Consumption of Sodium,” describes successful strategies identified in case studies of six communities working to reduce sodium consumption through practice changes that included both environmental strategies and voluntary policies to support individual behavior change.

 The third paper, “Community Partnerships for Translating Policy to Practice in Chronic Disease Prevention,” describes how a national organization supported local health departments in developing organizational practice changes that enhanced and supported local policies in nutrition and physical activity, including approaches to encourage implementation of these strategies through training and financial incentives. 

Following the three presentations, the discussant will identify contrasts and common themes among the presentations in terms of the relationship between formal and informal policies, and will moderate a discussion among presenters and attendees.  The diversity of health areas represented – including sodium consumption, breast-feeding and teen dating violence prevention – will underscore the common issues underlying strategic choices in policy and practice change.