Healthy Community Pilot Project RCT Study

Overview

Aims: To enhance mental well-being of adolescents, adults and their families by creating a positive, happy and joyful environment in the community. Targets: Adults aged 18-59 and their family members in Hong Kong. Methods: Healthy Community Pilot Project will adopt the public health and family-focused approach, under the brand name of "Joyful@HK Campaign". Evidence-based and Evidence Generating approach with vigorous study design, both qualitative (e.g. focus groups) and quantitative (e.g. randomised controlled trial), will be used to evaluate the overall programme effectiveness including follow-up of at least one month ("best science"). To ensure the practicability and sustainability of the community-based engagement project, we will engage community partners with strong track records of "best practice" to design, plan, and implement the intervention. This project will use innovative and integrated positive psychology and public health theories and methods to plan brief, simple, and cost-effective intervention. Significance: By using "best science" in the design and evaluation of intervention programme, and the "best practice" of the partners' skills, experience and strong connection with service targets in the community, the intervention, if proven to be effective, for promoting sharing, mind and enjoyment and enhancing mental well-being can be further developed and widely disseminated to and adopted by the practitioners in the health and social service sectors for replication and improvement to benefit the whole population.

Healthy Community Pilot Project is one of the six Community-based Mental Wellness Project for Adolescents and Adults, which aims at enhancing mental well-being of adolescents, adults and their families by creating a positive, happy and joyful environment in the community. The project is funded by Health Care and Promotion Fund of Food and Health Bureau. Healthy Community Pilot Project is organized by the Hong Kong Council of Social Service and led by the School of Public Health, The University of Hong Kong.The project will organize one train-the-trainer workshop to train the service providers from 8-10 NGO service units on the concept of sharing, mind and enjoyment (SME), ways of conducting SME family-based physical activities and knowledge of adult mental health problem (in particular the mixed anxiety and depressive disorder). Two SME family-based physical activities will be held by the NGO service providers in collaboration with 3 District Healthy City Committees. Each NGO service unit may organize enjoyable SME family-based physical activities according to the needs of individual district and to promote positive psychology under the theme of Sharing, Mind and Enjoyment. One wisdom sharing session will be organized to members of District Healthy City Committees to promote best practice of community mental wellness project. The major subjects of the Healthy Community Pilot Project RCT study are 150-200 families with 400 participants. 3 District Healthy City Committees will be selected as collaborators. 10-18 NGO service units will either be randomized into intervention service units and control service units. Cluster Randomized Control Trial will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention programme. In the study, families will be invited to complete a series of questionnaires or invited to attend focus groups to measure the sharing, mind and enjoyment related behavioural changes, mental well-being and subjective changes. NGO workers who joined the train-the-trainer workshop will also be invited to complete questionnaires to measure their knowledge about mental health, skills of conducting SME family-based physical activities and their sharing, mind and enjoyment related behavioural change. They will be invited to focus group interview to assess their experience and feedback on this project while community partners will be invited to individual in-depth interviews to assess the outcomes of community engagement process. HKU team will conduct evaluation during the programme implementation stage. The effectiveness of the intervention, as well as the level of participation and ratings for the intervention will also be evaluated.