Applying Lessons Learned during the Implementation of a Province-Wide Strategy to Promote Youth Healthy Relationships: The Need for Adaptations to Address Barriers to Success

Promoting healthy relationships is increasingly recognized as key to the prevention of risk behaviors that adversely impact overall youth well-being. The provincial plan described in this symposium was designed to offer programming that would address these risk behaviors, in order to improve the health of youth throughout the province. Since 2012, the strategy has reached over 23,000 youth, and has met many of the goals identified in the initial plan. However, a challenge since the beginning of the strategy has been achieving implementation fidelity within school settings. Reasons for this challenge have been explored using implementation tracking data and feedback from key stakeholders, and primarily stem from a lack of systems support (e.g., competing priorities at the school and Ministry level). Further, recent survey data from trained teachers indicate that, following the first year of training, only about 50% continue to implement. Thus, issues with sustainability are also apparent. While we have worked in the past 3 years to cultivate systems support for healthy relationships programming, these findings indicate that this work is not yet creating the systems change necessary to promote sustainable and high-quality implementation of youth healthy relationships programming, and that we are not yet meeting Components 3 (supporting the development of a strategic and coordinated approach to violence prevention programming for children and youth from K -12) and 7 (advocating for an evidence-based approach to healthy relationship programming in school jurisdictions throughout Alberta) of the strategy.

Given these findings, and the desire to work towards systems change, the strategy is now moving to an implementation systems model. This model, based primarily on the Interactive Systems Framework, but also drawing on PROSPER and Communities that Care, was designed to address provincial context, as well as barriers identified in the first three years of the strategy, and more broadly engages key stakeholders within relevant systems (e.g., school divisions, schools). This implementation system also provides a much greater level of support for teachers who are implementing strategy programming. In this presentation, we will describe the development of this model; work with policy-makers to implement the model (including work to create an allocated position within a key government agency to provide training, technical assistance, coaching and support to implementation teams); and plans for the pilot testing of the model. Using data to inform the continual improvement of program dissemination is key to ensuring that implementation best meets prevention goals.