Community participation in health promotion programs in Portugal: development and implementation of the Cascais Local Forum for Health Promotion

Resumo

Current international and national guidelines on health promotion recommend the collaborative involvement of the communities that will use and benefit from the implementation of policies and interventions in public health. As such, communities should be involved in every step of the process, from setting priorities to dissemination of findings and outcomes that they will use to address health of communal concern. In Portugal, there has been a growing interest in participatory approaches mainly to set priorities that address diverse societal concerns. In the particular case of health promotion, it stills not a widespread approach. This paper aims to describe the development and implementation of the Cascais Local Forum for Health Promotion (FCPS). Cascais FCPS is a local network of public schools, profit and non-profit organizations and private companies from the healthcare sector that share a common purpose: to increase health and well-being of people living in Cascais. To accomplish this main endeavour, Cascais FCPS adopted a community-based participatory research approach and fosters the involvement of citizens throughout the whole process of developing and implementing the Local Strategy for Health Promotion (ELPS 2016-2020). Cascais FCPS also established a partnership with an academic research institution and created the Cascais Observatory for Health Promotion (Cascais OPS). Cascais OPS independently assesses the partnership process and outcomes under the ELPS 2016-2020, among other responsibilities more devoted to research in public health promotion. Several partnership- and methodological-related challenges are anticipated for the upcoming years; as such, Cascais OPS in collaboration with Cascais FCPS have produced a set of recommendations on how to tackle these. In the Portuguese context, Cascais FCPS is an innovative programme in public health promotion at the local level, which despite its young age (formally created in 2016), it has been successful in the accomplishment of its main objectives