From Engagement to Action: Co-designing Health Interventions with Communities and across Sectors

About

This course explores community engagement and co-design for health interventions, taking a multisectoral perspective grounded in evidence on the social determinants of health. It focuses on strategic and practical considerations for engaging communities in meaningful and sustainable ways across the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of health interventions. The course examines how community engagement and co-design can be strategically designed and implemented in contexts where health objectives depend on collaboration among actors from health, social, economic, and other sectors. Through interactive discussions and applied case work, participants analyze how engagement processes can be aligned with institutional mandates, decision-making processes, and implementation realities, with an emphasis on clarifying whom to engage, how and when engagement should take place, and how community input can inform decisions and support effective multisector action

Course leader

Florence Secula, Health Promotion Expert (Swiss TPH)

Target group

Practitioners, researchers, and graduate students

Course aim

By the end of the course participants will be able to:
- Explain the value of community engagement for health-related interventions, drawing on evidence on the social determinants of health.
- Analyse health-related interventions to identify key community and sectoral stakeholders, their roles, interests, and influence.
- Design context-appropriate community engagement and co-design processes for multisector health-related interventions.
- Assess how power, incentives, and accountability shape community engagement and multisector collaboration in specific contexts.
- Select and apply practical tools to plan and facilitate community engagement across the intervention cycle (diagnosis, decision-making, implementation, and evaluation).
- Develop a draft community engagement and co-design plan adaptable to your professional or organizational contexts

Fee info

Discounts are available for PhD and Master’s students, participants from UMICs and LMICs, and members of LSS partner institutions (USI, SUPSI, Swiss TPH, and SSPH+). For details on fees and available discounts, contact us at info@ssph-lugano-summerschool.ch or visit our website.