The good practice portal in Germany and considerations towards integrating best evidence

Abstract

The good practice portal of the Federal Centre for Health Education / BZgA consists of a nationwide collection of projects and interventions to promote the health of socially disadvantaged groups at the community/setting level. Currently the portal includes 3067 practices, out of them 124 fulfil the good practice criteria and have been identified as such. The portal aims to disseminate (good) practice in Germany, promote its translation into action, create transparency in terms of quality criteria and make the diversity of practice more visible. A secondary aim is to promote regional networking and the exchange of experience. To this end, an exchange platform (inforo) is also offered via the operating agency, which however is still limited in use. The portal does not intend to identify the most effective practices, but to be a database of well-described interventions that were feasible to implement in Germany. Therefore, the evaluation process was designed as a mutual advisory process: Standardized description of project owners according to 12 good practice criteria- review by experts from the responsible coordinating offices of Equity in Health - peer evaluation by another coordinating body in another federal state - and finally evaluation by an expert from the nationwide working group at the BZgA. Thus, the evaluation process is also set up to promote mutual learning with the goal of in turn increasing quality of the practice nationwide, with the advantage of being close to the implementation needs and the potential disadvantage of lacking objectivity. At the moment, BZgA is assessing different possibilities to integrate evidence as criteria into its good practice portal. Therefore, this presentation will end with a discussion on possibilities to integrate the identification and selection of evidence-based/evidence-informed preventive interventions, including the use of evidence criteria and quality of evidence.