THE APHA CRITERIA FOR DEVELOPMENT OF HEALTH PROMOTION PROGRAMS APPLIED TO 4 HEALTHY COMMUNITY PROJECTS IN BRITISH-COLUMBIA

The British Columbia Healthy Communities projects are intersectoral he alth promotion programs emphasizing local policy development to put th e vision of the World Health Organization's and Canadian federal initi atives of Achieving Health for All into practical community action and organization. They attempt to convert the Ottawa Charter for Health P romotion into practical community action projects, including operation alizing the concepts of participation, empowerment and ownership. The American Public Health Association's (APHA) criteria for the developme nt of health promotion and education programs (American Journal of Pub lic Health, 77, 89-92, 1987) offer five standards by which to guide pr ogram design and implementation. As a test of the compatibility of the se two models, we present case analyses of four Healthy Community proj ects in relation to the APHA criteria. At this early stage of the proj ects we can only speculate as to the results likely to be attained by these municipalities. We conclude that the APHA criteria would disqual ify most of the Healthy Community projects as worthy health promotion programs, mainly on the APHA criteria requiring projects to have a mod ifiable risk-factor target of known epidemiological importance to heal th outcomes, having interventions that will clearly and effectively re duce a targeted risk factor and having built-in evaluation. We weight the relative merits of the Canadian community projects around the APHA criteria, concluding that different criteria might apply to different types of health promotion policies and programming.