Within healthcare, positive deviance has previously been applied at individual or organisational levels to improve specific clinical outcomes or processes of care.
With outside pressures to meet certain measures and internal pressures to decrease costs or improve specific local outcomes, organizations must decide where to put their energy.
At the global level, health system strengthening remains firmly narrowed down to its instrumental dimension – through well-targeted and specific interventions, most HSS programmes aim at contributing to improve specific health outcomes or financial protection of specific groups.
Projects which aim to improve specific disease outcomes, such as implementation of guidelines for the optimal management of community acquired pneumonia, are often perceived as difficult, of minimal benefit to the institution and not successful in achieving long lasting changes.
Our results suggest that a BTS-based approach can be effectively applied at a sub-district level to improve specific health system processes and outcomes.
A first step in the process of health delivery and public health systems working together is to map where their patients of health delivery systems live and then form partnerships with the local health departments in those communities to collaborate on improving specific health outcomes.
These interventions could be directed either at improving specific health outcomes or improving men's uptake of services.
Although many scientific studies have tried to maximize effects with high-frequency and moderate-to-high intensity of exercise, 14 there has also been an example of a low-frequency (such as once a week) program that succeeded in improving specific health outcomes in the aged (eg, strength).
The purposes of this study were to evaluate the feasibility and tolerability of the GRIP intervention, and to compare the effectiveness of GRIP versus treatment as usual (TAU) for improving specific clinical and psychosocial outcomes.
For diabetes, nine PCTs invested in initiatives which they expected to reduce emergency admissions, 23 invested in initiatives which they expected to improve disease-specific outcomes and 6 invested in initiatives which they expected to increase retinal screening.
