Health promotion in basque local primary care centers: results from implementation strategy optimization and evaluation

Healthcare systems must shift focus from curative, or “sick”, care to preventive approaches intended to keep people well. In 2006, the Primary Care Research Unit of Bizkaia (in Bilbao, Spain) began a systematic action research program to investigate the effective integration of healthy lifestyle promotion into the real life, day-to-day primary health care (PHC) setting. The primary aim is the optimization of health promotion in PHC. Both quantitative and qualitative indicators are evaluated after each phase of the project in order to be able to effectively scale-up the intervention across the local PHC centers, and later generalize to other centers, in a costefficient and valid fashion.