“Making Every School in Ghana a Health Promoting School”

The Affordable Health Research Centre (AHRC) is providing advice on a project assessing the intention to transform schools in Health Promoting Schools and the feasibility of implementing the Affordable Health Initiative Health Promoting School model, or, alternatively, only the Dental Health Care component of the model in public schools in the Afigya Kwabre South District, Ghana.

Aim of the research

This study will assess whether school headteachers (stakeholders) would transform their school in a health promoting school, as well as to assess whether they would implement the Affordable Health Initiative Health Promoting School model, identifying determinants of stakeholders’ behaviour towards transforming schools in a health promoting schools, barriers, facilitators and potential solutions to challenges affecting implementation of the initiative in schools in the Afigya Kwabre South District, Ghana.

Nature of the research

The implementation research conceptual framework adopted in this study was described by Proctor et all in 2010 (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10488-010-0319-7). Implementation research attempts to identify to solve a wide range of implementation problem, and assess the impact of an intervention in the “real world”. Implementation research can consider any aspect of implementation, including the factors affecting implementation, the processes of implementation, including how to introduce potential solutions into a health promotion strategy or how to promote their large-scale use and sustainability. Implementation research design is appropriate  to understand what, why, and how interventions work in “real world” settings and to test approaches to improve them (https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f6753.full.print). The domains proposed to assess the factors affecting the implementation of the AHI HPS model are acceptability, adoption, appropriateness, feasibility, fidelity, implementation cost, coverage, and sustainability.