Dose Toolkit

Getting to the right dose

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 strategies can include focused programs that target relatively few people, such as classes on how to cook healthy meals, and policies and environmental strategies that reach everyone in a community, like increasing the amount of healthy food in grocery stores. How can we measure the effects of different strategies, and use this information to strengthen the overall impact of an initiative?

Dose methods allow us to calculate the impact of very different strategies aiming to achieve the same outcome, 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. 

CCHE used dose methods to evaluate the collective impact of a Healthy Eating Active Living initiative. Using this method we compared building sidewalks to increase walkability (high-reach, low-strength) to a daily walking group (low-reach, high-strength). Dose calculation also helped our partners have more informed discussions on how to increase initiative impact through greater scale (reach) and greater impact (strength) on each person affected.  

To help evaluators and community practitioners use the dose method in their work, we've created Healthy Dose: A Toolkit for Boosting the Impact of Community Health Strategies.  You can learn more about the dose method and its application to strengthening community health by exploring the tools and resources below:
 
Dose Overview — A brief overview of Dose.
Dose Calculator — An Excel spreadsheet to assist with calculating Dose for community intervention strategies.
Healthy Dose Presentation — A PowerPoint presentation that walks audiences through Dose.
Strategy Selection Checklist — Thoughtful questions to consider when choosing community intervention strategies. 
Strength Rating Guide — A tool that presents the average strength of common community intervention strategies to assist when planning strategy clusters.