Minnesota Institute of Public Health

The last decade has been quite the breakthrough in effective and evidence-based prevention programs, policies and practices. Justifiably, it is no longer OK to use the tired old argument “but how do you measure something that DIDN’T happen because of your program?”, or “I know my program works – I can see it in my kids’ eyes!”.  The day of just counting how many brochures we distributed or how many people we talked with as a measure of prevention effectiveness are gone. In this era of preciously limited prevention resources, we are obliged to do what is most likely to work, and to account for what happened when we did our prevention program, or practice.

At MIPH, our Central Center for the Application of Prevention Technologies (Central CAPT) federal grant funded by the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention has for ten years been dedicated to bridging prevention research and community practice. We’ve done this by facilitating the work of Central Region states and the Red Lake Nation in identifying selecting, implementing and evaluating proven best practices in prevention. 

I think we’ve successfully helped communities get closer to and more comfortable with evidenced-based prevention.

There is a terrific resource for people to use, called the National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices, or NREPP. If you click on the link below, you will see a power point evolved by our Central CAPT staff, which profiles prevention efforts and helps users learn about programs and practices that are proven effective, with emphasis on outcomes. You will learn about what goes into making a program/practice evidence-based acceptable, how they are evaluated, and even how your own program/practice may be able to be evaluated, and perhaps disseminated.

All of this is to help make prevention work better. Check it out.