01. Identified Research Questions in Partnership
In 2016, a partnership developed between members of at the University of Sydney (with The Australian Partnership Prevention Centre), the Office of Preventive Health, the Local Health Districts, and the NSW Ministry of Health. Together, we identified a series of research questions that we were interested in exploring, and began designing a research protocol.
The Research Questions
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1. Describe the diversity of teams and contexts within which PHIMS is used and the differences in use, if any
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2. Observe the breadth and intensity of work that goes into supporting early childhood services and schools to adopt practices and how this translates to data in PHIMS
3. Explore factors that influence adoption of practices within early childhood services and schools and the extent to which they are captured in PHIMS
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4. Examine how PHIMS sits alongside other methods to structure, organise, record and manage health promotion practice at the local level
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5. Understand how the technology interacts with the process of practice and how roles, routines and activities are impacted and how data are used
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6. Articulate what matters most to health promotion practitioners in their practice—e.g. their values, attitudes and actions
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7. Identify how performance monitoring via PHIMS use has impacted the field of health promotion in NSW from myriad perspectives including, for example, practitioners, health promotion managers, state-level program coordinators and funders, partnering sectors, and policy-level decision makers
02. Ethnography: Site Visits and Interviews
The intent of ethnography is to provide a detailed account of everyday practice. This made it the perfect method to use to study PHIMS in practice. Basically, it means that researchers spend time with people, in normal settings, doing normal things to learn about what their life is like. In our case, we were interested in the subtle ways that PHIMS interacts with practice. The researchers visited all local health districts, and spent 59 days total with health promotion officers as they delivered programs and used PHIMS. Sometimes, we had causal interviews with people which we audio recorded. We created 71 fieldnotes totalling over 380 pages of data!
03. First Stage of the Analysis
With all that data, we needed a way to organize it so that we could analyse it in the future. We created a codebook which is like a map of the data. You can explore the codebook by clicking on the image below.
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04. Engage HCI Teams in feedback and reflection on initial findings
This is where we are now! All HCI teams have been invited to participate in an interactive webinar about some of the early findings from the project.
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05. Interviews with Managers and Decision Makers
We held interviews with a number of high level policymakers to help set the scene. We then went on to interview every health promotion director in NSW. The results are here
06. Social Network Analysis
We are all set up to run a survey of professional networks at the practice level in early 2019. You will be receiving an email inviting you to take part. We have piloted the methods already. We need to get a response rate of 70% or higher or the results will be useless (too sparse, too biased to be worth analysing). So we will be putting a lot of effort into this.
07. Tailored Feedback to LHD Teams (as requested)
We are available to meet with each team to discuss our findings, and what we learned in your local health district. Please contact us to schedule a meeting.
08. Webinars for interpreting results
We will be holding webinars in March/April 2019 to discuss our findings and involve you in interpreting them. These were very helpful to us last year, when we had preliminary results. In 2019 our results are much further advanced. But they are not considered "final" until you have had a chance to comment on them.
09. Deep Reflection on Findings with Partners
One of the benefits of working in partnership is that we can report what we are learning quickly, and in a way that helps them use learnings to inform their work.
We will be conducting a workshop with our research partners. Using a "map", which visually represents our key findings, we will be shining a light in the "black boxes" of how PHIMS works. Through this process, we hope to discover new insights which could inform practice improvements for how PHIMS is supported and operates.