The Western Australian School Health Project: comparing the effects of intervention intensity on organizational support for school health promotion

Abstract

The aim of this study was to evaluate changes in school health promotion practice related to two levels of intervention in the Western Australian School Health (WASH) Project: (1) a low-intensity intervention involving a single mail-out of WASH Project resources, and (2) a high-intensity intervention involving training, planning time and expert support. The schools involved in the study were divided into three groups. Treatment group 1 received the high-intensity intervention, treatment group 2 received the low-intensity intervention and a comparison group received no intervention. Two scales were developed to assess change, i.e. a school organizational scale (Chronbach's alpha = 0.76) and a health promotion activity scale (Chronbach's alpha = 0.79). The results indicate that a high-intensity intervention, such as the WASH Project, which provides training to a critical mass of school community members from each school, ongoing access to an expert in the field, as well as dedicated planning time, is able to increase the comprehensiveness and quality of health strategic planning by schools. Furthermore, the results suggest that a low-intensity mail-out intervention is no more successful in initiating change that providing no intervention at all.