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An analysis of the adaptability of a professional development program in public health: results from the ALPS Study

Overview of attention for article published in BMC Health Services Research, June 2015
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Title
An analysis of the adaptability of a professional development program in public health: results from the ALPS Study
Published in
BMC Health Services Research, June 2015
DOI 10.1186/s12913-015-0903-3
Pubmed ID
Authors

Lucie Richard, Sara Torres, Marie-Claude Tremblay, François Chiocchio, Éric Litvak, Laurence Fortin-Pellerin, Nicole Beaudet

Abstract

Professional development is a key component of effective public health infrastructures. To be successful, professional development programs in public health and health promotion must adapt to practitioners' complex real-world practice settings while preserving the core components of those programs' models and theoretical bases. An appropriate balance must be struck between implementation fidelity, defined as respecting the core nature of the program that underlies its effects, and adaptability to context to maximize benefit in specific situations. This article presents a professional development pilot program, the Health Promotion Laboratory (HPL), and analyzes how it was adapted to three different settings while preserving its core components. An exploratory analysis was also conducted to identify team and contextual factors that might have been at play in the emergence of implementation profiles in each site. This paper describes the program, its core components and adaptive features, along with three implementation experiences in local public health teams in Quebec, Canada. For each setting, documentary sources were analyzed to trace the implementation of activities, including temporal patterns throughout the project for each program component. Information about teams and their contexts/settings was obtained through documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with HPL participants, colleagues and managers from each organization. While each team developed a unique pattern of implementing the activities, all the program's core components were implemented. Differences of implementation were observed in terms of numbers and percentages of activities related to different components of the program as well as in the patterns of activities across time. It is plausible that organizational characteristics influencing, for example, work schedule flexibility or learning culture might have played a role in the HPL implementation process. This paper shows how a professional development program model can be adapted to different contexts while preserving its core components. Capturing the heterogeneity of the intervention's exposure, as was done here, will make possible in-depth impact analyses involving, for example, the testing of program-context interactions to identify program outcomes predictors. Such work is essential to advance knowledge on the action mechanisms of professional development programs.

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Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 55 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
Unknown 55 100%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Researcher 7 13%
Student > Ph. D. Student 6 11%
Student > Master 6 11%
Student > Bachelor 4 7%
Unspecified 3 5%
Other 11 20%
Unknown 18 33%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Medicine and Dentistry 9 16%
Nursing and Health Professions 8 15%
Psychology 4 7%
Unspecified 3 5%
Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutical Science 2 4%
Other 7 13%
Unknown 22 40%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 2. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 15 December 2015.
All research outputs
#14,231,577
of 22,817,213 outputs
Outputs from BMC Health Services Research
#5,070
of 7,636 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#136,289
of 264,437 outputs
Outputs of similar age from BMC Health Services Research
#67
of 96 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 22,817,213 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 35th percentile – i.e., 35% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 7,636 research outputs from this source. They typically receive more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 7.7. This one is in the 30th percentile – i.e., 30% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 264,437 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one is in the 45th percentile – i.e., 45% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
We're also able to compare this research output to 96 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 27th percentile – i.e., 27% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.