title: Disseminating policy and environmental change interventions: insights from obesity prevention and tobacco control.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Public health and other practitioners increasingly are being asked to implement policy and environmental change interventions, yet many practitioners lack the knowledge, skills, and resources to do so. In response to this need, a growing number of organizations are disseminating evidence-based interventions (EBIs) and building practitioners' capacity to use those interventions in practice. Although advances have been made on approaches to disseminating individual-level EBIs, little is known about the optimal way to disseminate EBIs to promote policy and environmental change.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  This paper describes the approach that two projects developed to disseminate policy and environmental change interventions. The Center for Training and Research Translation (Center TRT) disseminates EBIs to promote physical activity and healthy eating. Counter Tobacco disseminates EBIs to counter tobacco product sales and marketing in the retail environment.
  
  
  METHODS
  Both Centers (1) identify the best available evidence, (2) disseminate menus of intervention strategies, (3) provide implementation guidance, (4) incorporate stories from the field, (5) build practitioners' capacity, and (6) integrate dissemination into practitioners' existing social networks. The Centers' process evaluations included website analytics and online surveys.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Over 26,000 unique visitors accessed the Center TRT website in 2012 and over 17,000 have accessed Counter Tobacco's site since its launch in August 2011. The majority of respondents to Centers' surveys agreed that resources were easy to access and use.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Both Centers have had success reaching their intended audiences. Research is now needed to assess the extent of practitioners' use of Center resources and the impact of the resulting interventions.
authors.affiliation: School of Nursing, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1200 Carrington Hall, CB #7460, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599-7460, USA, jleeman@email.unc.edu.
authors.forename: Jennifer
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Leeman
authors.forename: Allison E
authors.initials: AE
authors.lastname: Myers
authors.forename: Kurt M
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Ribisl
authors.forename: Alice S
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Ammerman
mesh_terms: D006291:Health Policy; D006801:Humans; D009765:Obesity / Q000517:prevention & control*; D011634:Public Health; D062789:Tobacco Products