Public health is a worldwide concern at the moment, more than ever before. With the outbreak of Covid19 and the continued rise in cases and variants across the world, people in affected countries are turning to those who have managed to reopen and reduce their preventative actions in an effort to return to normal. What are they doing that no one else did? After so many words and broken promises, now people are looking for facts through evidence.
What Are Evidence Based Interventions?
These are practices and programs which have peer-reviewed, documented and empirical evidence of effectiveness. They use agreeable and easy to understand facts built off of statistics taken over time which gauge the effectiveness of certain strategies and policies to enforce positive change.
These are implemented once enough data has been collected that a verifiable conclusion can be drawn as to the effectiveness of the strategies in play that correlate to changes that happen in real time. It serves as a way to show, with facts, that certain things are helping or not helping and goes beyond conjecture or theorizing by offering the direct proof to skeptics who might be resistant to believing it.
How Is It Implemented?
The most important factor to implementing an evidence based intervention is the availability of the material. Ensure that the material gathered is from reputable sources with as much professional backing as possible, and include contrary evidence as well to help support the proven theories. Any established, peer-reviewed document will have to go through a level of scrutinization and disproving before it can be properly asserted. No good theory can go uncontested, that is what leads to the most present disbelief among an audience.
Once enough high quality evidence and proof is gathered, it must be made available. This can be done through a controlled dispersal, such as through an assembly or mailing letter, but a more direct presentation is often preferred to capture the attention of a target demographic. Gear the presentation towards the ideal demographic, the group that needs an intervention the most, and arrange to have it broadcast at a time or place that most suits them. It can be a controlled event or something persistent like an advertisement or similar style of campaign online.
Any highly resistant demographic or movement will meet the intervention with skepticism. The best scenario would be for everyone to understand the information offered and accept it as real and proven, but this is rarely the case. So, any counter-arguments should be met within the evidence itself and addressed. Engage with people who come with countering ideas and give them the facts that best work against their argument in a plain and calm manner. Disagreement
may lead to emotional confrontations, which are the hardest to work through with facts and logic.
Why We Need This Now
There are still many demographics that are either confused, scared or totally apathetic to the developing concerns of public health because they don’t have all the facts, or don’t trust one source to deliver the facts to them. Organizing a proper evidence based intervention can gather those people together, address their concerns, and allow more of them to leave feeling safer and more learned than there were before.