Process-evaluation of the implementation of a collaborative community programme for health, safety and talent development in youth

• The program led to collaboration and shared goal setting in community stakeholders. • Guidance of the municipality was appreciated by community stakeholders. • Choosing suitable interventions was seen as hard despite the integrated action plans. • Engagement of the community network, also during the COVID-pandemic, was a challenge. • Insight in the output and keeping other municipal teams aligned was challenging. We studied the implementation-process of a collaborative community programme (Promising Neighbourhoods) aiming to impact local urban youths’ health, safety and talent development and reduce socio-economic health differences. In three intervention neighbourhoods categorised as having low, middle and high problem severity an integrated community programme was implemented and compared to three similar neighbourhoods in which the programme was not implemented. Due to contextual challenges, some of the planned data-collection activities could not be executed as intended. We compensated for this by collecting alternative data where possible. Focus group discussions were conducted among community stakeholders and additionally among municipal professionals on the operational and tactical-strategic level to examine ‘assets’, ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’ of the programme. Questionnaires were administered among parents of 0- to 12-year-olds to additionally examine care or service use and participation in organized activities by parents and children. Project documentation was additionally used to examine ‘outputs’. Focus group data was analysed using thematic coding, The parent questionnaire was analysed for differences post-implementation using chi-square tests and project documentation was summarized descriptively. The intervention neighbourhoods formed broad networks of stakeholders and succeeded in shared priority setting and developing integrated action plans. Choosing interventions for implementation was regarded as difficult. Data-gathering by the municipality on intervention implementation and reach of target populations did not succeed. The parent-questionnaire yielded no differences between intervention and comparator neighbourhoods in care or service use or participation in organized activities in parents or children post-implementation. The findings indicate that although some steps in the programme seemed successful, future research with a longer follow-up period that take into account the challenges to study the implementation-process of integrated community programmes is needed to further elucidate which components contribute to the desired impact of integrated community programmes.