About the Canadian Best Practices Portal

The Canadian Best Practices Portal (CBPP) is a compendium of community interventions related to chronic disease prevention and health promotion that have been evaluated, shown to be successful, and have the potential to be adapted and replicated by other health practitioners working in similar fields. The Portal is one part of your solution to improving public health program decision-making by enabling front-line health practitioners to access well evaluated and effective chronic disease prevention and health promotion interventions.

Launched publicly in November of 2006, it is a major project of the Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Control (CCDPC) within the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC). It contains:

• A catalogue of best practice systematic review sites
• A searchable database of interventions
• Resources to help you reach your public health planning, chronic disease prevention and health promotion goals

Table of Content

• Goals and objectives
• Intended Audiences and Partners
• Basing Decisions on Evidence
• Background Documents

Goals and Objectives

The purpose of the CBPP is to provide decision makers with better access to published and unpublished information about proven and emerging "best" practices models, theories, methods, research evidence and practical experience.

The Portal also consolidates multiple sources of interventions, practices and resources for health promotion and chronic disease prevention that are recommended by experts across Canada and internationally.

Intended Audiences and Partners

The intended audience of the Portal is decision makers in health promotion, public health and chronic disease prevention, including:

• Frontline public health workers
• Non-government and voluntary organization program coordinators

Basing Decisions on Evidence: Using the CBPP to inform your public health work

Not all evidence is judged to be of equal value; some levels of research design are evaluated as having greater strengths and value in the decision making process. Certain types of interventions have undergone rigorous experimental quantitative research and have been shown to be effective at significantly impacting targeted outcomes within a controlled environment. Other types of interventions have evidence supported by quantitative data from non-experimental studies showing positive outcomes, but have not been researched well enough to generalize the results at a broader population. Further, there are interventions that may contain both quantitative and qualitative data, and compared against similar types of research as part of an independent review that shows an overall picture of the evidence (i.e. systematic review). Needless to say, evidence comes in many different forms and understanding the methods behind how the evidence is generated can be difficult.

The CBPP is a part of an evidence-based public health approach that encourages the use of effective interventions based on appropriately designed methods that are well evaluated. Basing decisions on evidence follows part of the over-arching Population Health Approach developed by the Public Health Agency and endorsed by the CBPP.

The benefits include:

• assurance that decision-making is based on scientific evidence and effective practices;
• helps ensure the retrieval of up-to-date and reliable information about what works and doesn't work for a particular public health issue;
• ensuring your time is being used most efficiently and productively in reviewing the 'best of the best' information available on your particular public health issue

Click here and go to Element 3 of the Population Health Approach: Base Decisions on Evidence

Although the CBPP does not attach labels such as "BEST" or "PROMISING" to the interventions found on the Portal's database, we aim to provide enough information in the Interventions-at-a-Glance table for you to select an intervention, or conduct further research by going into the intervention details pages, for adaptation or implementation into your community.

For more information on information on how the CBPI came to classify interventions, click here to open up the Portal methodology background paper.

Background Documents

Methodology Background Paper