Evidencia sobre la participación comunitaria en salud en el contexto español: reflexiones y propuestas. Informe SESPAS 2018

Abstract

Community engagement has recently become key in the development of health promotion programmes at a local level. However, evidence-based tools are necessary to implement strategies and interventions with a participatory approach. The objective of this article is to reflect on the existing evidence in Spain about community engagement in health, drawing on the results of the AdaptA GPS Project (Adapt and Apply Health Promotion Guidelines), intended to adapt NICE guideline NG44 on community engagement to improve health and wellbeing, and to reduce inequalities. After describing the methodology for the adaptation process, we discuss some of the findings from the review of the evidence on community engagement in the Spanish context. We ask whether the limited evidence identified is due to the difficulties involved in evaluating these interventions, or to the lack of interest in these programmes and the limited resources and funding dedicated to them. Two recommendations are proposed: to promote more and better research, fostering training, research and evaluation towards the development of community engagement interventions in health, and to promote more and better interventions using evidence-based tools, supporting their long-term sustainability by taking into account the time needed for community engagement programmes to be properly developed. Generating more evidence on community engagement in health in Spain will allow us to learn from successful processes and encourage the transfer of good practice to different contexts.