Goal attainment scaling as a tool to enhance quality in community-based health promotion.

OBJECTIVES

Goal attainment scaling (GAS) is an individual approach for measuring changes in clinical interventions. We adopted GAS as a tool for community-based health promotion to support practitioners in formulating and monitoring their intervention goals.

METHODS

Eleven regional health promotion networks were invited to set project-specific goals, following Kiresuk and Sherman's rules for goal setting. Follow-up interviews on goal attainment were conducted twenty-one months later. In addition, each network was interviewed on usage and applicability.

RESULTS

In total, 35 goals were set. The expected outcomes were reached for the majority of projects.

CONCLUSIONS

GAS has been proven to be a useful instrument for quality assurance as it helps with setting and monitoring goals and sub-goals.