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Goal attainment scaling as a tool to enhance quality in community-based health promotion

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International Journal of Public Health

Abstract

Objectives

Goal attainment scaling (GAS) is an individual approach for measuring changes in clinical interventions. We adopted GAS as a tool for community-based health promotion to support practitioners in formulating and monitoring their intervention goals.

Methods

Eleven regional health promotion networks were invited to set project-specific goals, following Kiresuk and Sherman’s rules for goal setting. Follow-up interviews on goal attainment were conducted twenty-one months later. In addition, each network was interviewed on usage and applicability.

Results

In total, 35 goals were set. The expected outcomes were reached for the majority of projects.

Conclusions

GAS has been proven to be a useful instrument for quality assurance as it helps with setting and monitoring goals and sub-goals.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical standard

The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of Bremen, Germany.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universität Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany

    Petra Kolip & Ina Schaefer

Authors
  1. Petra Kolip
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  2. Ina Schaefer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Petra Kolip.

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Kolip, P., Schaefer, I. Goal attainment scaling as a tool to enhance quality in community-based health promotion. Int J Public Health 58, 633–636 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00038-013-0471-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00038-013-0471-4

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