Developing a tool to build capacity for healthy public policy change

Municipalities shape living conditions for their residents and are critical settings for healthy public policy action on health equities, determinants and outcomes. Healthy public policies refer to policies that impact living conditions and determinants of health, and can be implemented in various sectors. The nature of policy work, however, can pose barriers through complex policy processes, multiple policy actor groups, and political and budgetary pressures. This paper describes the development of the Policy Readiness Tool which helped to address a gap in availability of theory-driven, evidence-based resources supporting policy actors’ capacity to encourage healthy public policy implementation. 

Analysis of 50 years of municipal bylaws, municipal representatives’ responses to questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews with policy developers and advocates were used to identify characteristics of the adopter municipalities, level of innovativeness, and strategies for encouraging policy change. These findings informed development of the Tool’s components: an online self-administered questionnaire assessing the level of readiness for policy change; specific strategies for encouraging change aligned with the level of readiness; and general strategies for change. The Tool was built to support policy change efforts in a number of ways, such as making the policy process more visible and strategic, inform use of limited resources, and enable policy actors’ capability to tailor strategies to particular contexts. 

The Tool became available online in 2014 (www.policyreadinesstool.com) and consistently receives over 1,000 visits each year. It has been widely used by government, advocacy, non-government, business, and educational organizations.

To learn more about the work behind this successful tool, read the full publication.