Policy advocacy for public health practitioners: workshops on policy change

This article describes two workshops on health-promoting policy change, developed and delivered to more than 1,000 public and community health practitioners across one Canadian province. The workshops were designed to increase knowledge about the process of policy change and provide opportunities for skill development. Three basic instructional methods--minilectures, individual pen-and-paper exercises, and small-group activities--were used. Workshops were delivered using a host organization arrangement, meaning organizations willing to host workshops could do so if they provided the venue and invited members of other organizations in the community. Initial evaluations indicate that practitioners find the workshops useful and that many have integrated the information into their day-to-day work. To the author's knowledge, no other workshops of this nature have been delivered in this systematic way.