Population Dose: Capturing the combined impact of community health strategies

Community health initiatives seek to improve policies, programs, and neighborhood environments. Over the past 30 years, we’ve learned that we need multiple strategies to combat complex problems. These can include focused programs targeting relatively few people, such as classes on how to cook healthy meals, combined with policy and environmental ones that reach everyone in a community, like increasing the amount of healthy food in grocery stores. How can we combine the effects of different strategies to strengthen their overall impact? 

Dose methods allow us to add up the impact of very different strategies using a common yardstick. Dose combines reach—the number of people affected by a strategy—and strength—the degree to which those people change their behavior.

Using dose we can compare, for example, building sidewalks to increase walkability (high-reach, low-strength) to a daily walking group (low-reach, high-strength). Dose also helps focus attention on ways of increasing effect of initiatives—greater scale (reach) and greater impact (strength) on each person reached. We’ve distilled our learnings in a toolkit that can be used to plan and evaluate complex community initiatives, particularly those focused on healthy eating and active living.

Learn more about dose: Dose Toolkit

Links to peer-reviewed articles:

• Using dose in planning
• Using dose in evaluation
• Evaluating a community obesity prevention initiative using dose

Please contact us for more information about dose: Elena.S.Kuo@kp.org