The background for the Healthy Diversity Assessment Tool

How to transfer and use good practice

All over Europe, we find a wide range of publications describing good practice within social, work-related and educational efforts, within healthcare services, within cultural settings etc. Basically, the aim is to ensure that we don´t  “reinvent the wheel” over and over  again.  By describing and disseminating good practices, we can make a good and rational use of positive experience and results from one context to the other.

However, this transfer process seem to fail in many cases. The expected results and the intended effect do not really unfold in the new context. We realize that the transfer process is not that simple, and we may even tend to refuse good practice, which apparently cannot be transformed into our particular context and purposes.

It gives rise to question whether it is possible to transfer good practice, and this question is precisely the basis for the way we have chosen to present good practice in the HEALTHY DIVERSITY project. When good practice can only be transferred from a general framework description, we do not know the specific elements and methodical instruments that led to the positive results. We lack insight into the interaction between the specific target group, the specific interplay between different methods and the particular contextual conditions that produced just the right breeding ground for the results. Furthermore, in many cases, we do not know whether the good practice has a long-term and sustainable effect.

Based on these experiences, we describe a number of good practices from the HEALTHY DIVERSITY project from an analysis – and assessment tool that can provide insight into why, how and from what criteria a specific good practice has yielded positive results and the desired effect in the context and for the target group. With this approach, we hope to make good practice operational and transferable.