Évaluation d’un programme de développement professionnel en santé publique : le laboratoire de promotion de la santé

The emergence of the health promotion discourse a few decades ago steered public health practice into a new direction, orienting it toward community-based, participatory, and intersectoral action. Meanwhile, in Quebec, the 2004 healthcare system reform restructured the local level through the creation of health and social services centres. The mandate of these new organizations is to integrate the public health and the healthcare sector across a continuum of services ranging from health promotion all the way to palliative care.All these changes have significant implications for healthcare and public health practitioners, who must come to terms with new professional roles and new intervention strategies. Professional development is considered to be a potential lever for action to support these changes. In 2009, a team from the Public Health Directorate of the Health and Social Services Agency of Montreal designed a professional development program called the Health Promotion Laboratory. This program builds on a team learning approach to enable participants to develop new competencies, a reflexive practice, and new health promotion practices within the organization.  Based on a qualitative methodology and a collaborative evaluation approach, this doctoral thesis used several investigation strategies to evaluate three components of the Health Promotion Laboratory, i.e., the program’s conceptualization, implementation, and outcomes. More specifically, this thesis aims to: (1) examine the plausibility of the program’s intervention theory; (2) describe and understand the team learning processes involved in the program, as well as the factors influencing them; and (3) explore, from the participants’ perspective, the reflexivity outcomes of the program. In pursuing these objectives, this thesis adopts several theoretical perspectives related to adult learning, team learning, and organizational learning.  The results show that: (1) while there is room for improvement, the program’s model is generally well designed to achieve the intended outcomes; (2) the model’s implementation in two sites resulted in different team learning processes, both of which depended on common factors related to the participants, the team, the organizational context, and the implementation of the program itself; and (3) as intended, participants from both sites developed reflexivity with regard to their practice and their professional roles, with this reflexivity taking on a formative and a critical function in terms of their professional experience. These results highlight the potential offered by the evaluation of a program’s intervention theory for improving the conceptualization of a professional development program. They also demonstrate the importance and relevance of assessing the learning process at a group level in the context of a collective professional development approach. Finally, the findings support the importance of reflexive learning for improving professional practice and fostering the social engagement of practitioners. Thus, they suggest different avenues having the potential to strengthen the capacities of the public health workforce and thereby to increase its effectiveness in improving the health of communities in the coming century.

Keyphrases: formation continue, program evaluation, health promotion, continuing education, career  development, problem-based learning, adult learning, reflective learning, team learning  approach in education, team learning  approach in education