Building a Prevention System: Infrastructure to Strengthen Health Promotion Outcomes

Prevention systems improve the performance of health promotion interventions. This research describes the establishment of the Australian state government initiative, Healthy Together Victoria’s (HTV) macro infrastructure for the delivery of large-scale prevention interventions. Methods: This paper reports on findings of 31 semi-structured interviews about participants’ understanding of systems thinking and their reflections of the strengths and weaknesses of the HTV prevention system. A chronic disease prevention framework informed the coding that was used to create a causal loop diagram and a core feedback loop to illustrate the results. Results: Findings highlighted that HTV created a highly connected prevention system that included a sizeable workforce, significant funding and supportive leadership. Operating guidelines, additional professional development and real-time evaluation were significant gaps, which hindered systems practice. For inexperienced systems thinkers, these limitations encouraged them to implement programs, rather than interact with the seemingly ambiguous systems methods. Conclusions: HTV was an innovative attempt to strengthen health promotion infrastructure, creating a common language and shared understanding of prevention system requirements. However, the model was inadequate for HTV to achieve population-level reductions in chronic disease as system oversight was missing, as was an intervention delivery focus. Clarity was needed to define the systems practice that HTV was seeking to achieve. Importantly, the HTV prevention system needed to be understood as complex and adaptive, and not prioritized as individual parts.