Designing and Adapting Interventions to Promote Community Health: A Multilevel, Stepwise Approach 

The need for equitable approaches to ensure that all Americans have the best opportunity for good health requires population level health interventions that are effective and can be disseminated broadly and sustained over time. Multilevel interventions delivered in community settings hold the most promise for health promotion and disease prevention efforts because of their attention to broader community systems that increase the reach and sustainability of efforts. In this seminar, a four phase, stepwise approach for designing new and adapting existing community-based interventions will be presented. This approach highlights the need for community involvement in each phase of the process.
This talk focuses on two of the four phases of the design process, the Plan and Create phases, and describes how intervention teams identify the most impactful determinants to focus intervention efforts on as well as how to choose intervention components and strategies that have the greatest potential to impact change. Guidance on using the design process to adapt existing evidence-based interventions is also be discussed. Other intervention-related approaches, including Michie’s behavior change wheel and taxonomy and Collins’ approach for optimizing interventions using MOST is also discussed in relationship to this design approach.