From campaign to practice – public health frameworks applied in municipalities

Public health campaigns often provide seemingly clear frameworks for health services. When implemented into practice contextual and organizational adaptations are needed to put concepts into practice.

Background: The Act–Belong–Commit (ABC) campaign provides a simple framework to assist mental health service professionals to communicate with and gain the co-operation of potential partners and stakeholders for mental health promotion programs (Donovan et al, 2006). In 2024 the Trøndelag county was a pilot area to promote ABC as a framework for improving mental health among the population and to use ABC in the mental health services. Furthermore, a number of workplaces are experimenting with the use of ABC and other measures to improve their employees’ mental health. In this presentation we provide an overview of how public health campaigns (for example ABC) are implemented in practice within the municipalities (with a special focus on mental health services) and present a number of opportunities, barriers and outcomes of the practical implementation of a conceptual framework for both work processes and collaboration within the services.

Method: The presentation is based on qualitative data material gathered through interviews with public health coordinators, professionals in the mental health services and administrative staff in the three pilot municipalities. It furthermore contains data material and experiences from an experience workshop including the relevant stakeholders.

Results: Preliminary results suggest that while campaign message like that of ABC seem easy to understand, practical implementation requires adaptation to each organization’s and business’s specific context to find their own entry point into the framework. Many find the messages easy to grasp but harder to apply in their own context. This requires time and involvement from the entire organization.

Conclusion/implication: Even seemingly simple and compelling campaigns and frameworks like ABC can have their challenges when it comes to implementing them in practice as context, management support, inter- and intersectoral coordination and professional understanding and acceptance have to be taken into account. Still, we argue that public health campaigns aimed at the prevention of mental illness among growing parts of the population should be prioritized to strengthen public health in general and mental health in particular in the population as a whole.