Zhang Wei, Schaffer David, Tso Lai Sze, Tang Songyuan, Tang Weiming, Huang Shujie, Yang Bin, Tucker Joseph D
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Project-China, No.2 Lujing Road, Guangzhou, 510095, China.
Guangdong Provincial Dermatology Hospital, No.2 Lujing Road, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.
BMC Public Health. 2017 Jan 14;17(1):78. doi: 10.1186/s12889-016-4006-9.
Innovation contests call on non-experts to help solve problems. While these contests have been used extensively in the private sector to increase engagement between organizations and clients, there is little data on the role of innovation contests to promote health campaigns. We implemented an innovation contest in China to increase sexual health awareness among youth and evaluated community engagement in the contest.
The sexual health image contest consisted of an open call for sexual health images, contest promotion activities, judging of entries, and celebrating contributions. Contest promotion activities included in-person and social media feedback, classroom didactics, and community-driven activities. We conducted 19 semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample to ensure a range of participant scores, experts and non-expert participants, submitters and non-submitters. Transcripts of each interview were coded with Atlas.ti and evaluated by three reviewers.
We identified stages of community engagement in the contest which contributed to public health impact. Community engagement progressed across a continuum from passive, moderate, active, and finally strong engagement. Engagement was a dynamic process that appeared to have little relationship with formally submitting an image to the contest. Among non-expert participants, contest engagement increased knowledge, healthy attitudes, and empowered participants to share ideas about safe sex with others outside of the contest. Among experts who helped organize the contest, the process of implementing the contest fostered multi-sectoral collaboration and re-oriented public health leadership towards more patient-centered public health campaigns.
The results of this study suggest that innovation contests may be a useful tool for public health promotion by enhancing community engagement and re-orienting health campaigns to make them more patient-centered.
创新竞赛呼吁非专业人士协助解决问题。虽然这些竞赛在私营部门已被广泛用于增强组织与客户之间的互动，但关于创新竞赛在促进健康运动方面作用的数据却很少。我们在中国开展了一项创新竞赛，以提高青少年的性健康意识，并评估了社区对该竞赛的参与情况。
性健康图片竞赛包括公开征集性健康图片、竞赛推广活动、参赛作品评审以及表彰贡献。竞赛推广活动包括面对面和社交媒体反馈、课堂教学以及社区主导的活动。我们对一个有目的抽样的样本进行了19次半结构化访谈，以确保涵盖不同分数的参与者、专家和非专家参与者、提交者和非提交者。每次访谈的文字记录都用Atlas.ti进行编码，并由三位评审员进行评估。
我们确定了竞赛中社区参与的阶段，这些阶段对公共卫生产生了影响。社区参与沿着一个连续体发展，从被动、适度、积极，最终到强烈参与。参与是一个动态过程，似乎与正式向竞赛提交图片关系不大。在非专家参与者中，参与竞赛增加了知识、培养了健康态度，并使参与者有能力与竞赛之外的其他人分享关于安全性行为的想法。在协助组织竞赛的专家中，实施竞赛的过程促进了多部门合作，并使公共卫生领导重新定位，朝着更以患者为中心的公共卫生运动发展。
本研究结果表明，创新竞赛可能是促进公共卫生的有用工具，通过增强社区参与并使健康运动重新定位，使其更以患者为中心。
