Introduced to practice settings in 2014, the Population Health Information Management System (PHIMS) is an electronic monitoring system that was specifically designed by the NSW Ministry of Health to support the implementation of the largest ever scale-up of school and child care-based obesity prevention programs in Australia.

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In these programs, health promotion practitioners are commissioned with the important task of supporting schools and child care services in their area to make specific, evidence-based practice changes aimed at improving nutrition and physical activity for children in those settings.

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During 2017, we conducted a multi-site ethnographic case study to investigate how PHIMS is being used across NSW by health promotion practitioners, state-level managers and administrators, working on two flagship programs of the Healthy Children Initiative (HCI), Live Life Well @ School and Munch & Move.

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NSW Health has inbuilt, ongoing mechanisms to track the HCI and adjust PHIMS as needed over time. This project has been designed as a once-off opportunity to look behind the scenes in more depth at the systems of practice that lie beneath the data that is currently reflected in PHIMS.

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