In this study, we examined factors associated with children being driven to school. Participants were 1603 students (aged 9-11 years) and their parents from 24 public primary schools in inner western Sydney, Australia. Students recorded their modes of travel to and from school for 5 days in a student survey. Parents recorded their demographic data, their attitudes to travel, and their modes of travel to work, using a self-administered survey. An analysis of the two linked data sets found that 41% of students travelled by car to or from school for more than 5 trips per week. Almost a third (32%) of students walked all the way. Only 1% of students rode a bike and 22% used more than one mode of travel. Of those who were driven, 29% lived less than 1 km and a further 18% lived between 1 and 1.5 km from school. Factors associated with car travel (after adjusting for other potential confounders) were mode of parents' travel to work, parent attitudes, number of cars in the household, and distance from home to school. To be effective, walk to school programs need to address the link between parent journey to work and student journey to school.

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There is evidence of a correlation between adoption of the Ottawa Charter's framework of five action areas and health promotion programme effectiveness, but the Charter's framework has not been as fully implemented as hoped, nor is generally used by formal programme design models. In response, we aimed to translate the Charter's framework into a method to inform programme design. Our resulting design process uses detailed definitions of the Charter's action areas and evidence of predicted effectiveness to prompt greater consideration and use of the Charter's framework. We piloted the process by applying it to the design of four programmes of the Healthy Children's Initiative in New South Wales, Australia; refined the criteria via consensus; and made consensus decisions on the extent to which programme designs reflected the Charter's framework. The design process has broad potential applicability to health promotion programmes; facilitating greater use of the Ottawa Charter framework, which evidence indicates can increase programme effectiveness.

Setting up and implementing a single session family consultation in a specialist child and adolescent mental health setting, which for a long time has been an organisation and culture that has undertaken a traditional detailed child and family assessment and treatment, brings with it challenges. This paper will look at the history of single session consultation within the field of child and family services and, in particular, child and family services in mental health. It will also look at the development and implementation of a single session therapy program, and associated research on the effectiveness of the program, at the Alfred Child and Youth Mental Health Service. Clinical examples will assist in illustrating the program and its model and structures. Lastly, it will review the research data and compare this with other research data in the field.

An assessment of the quality of program evaluations conducted in South Australian community health services investigated how effective evaluation reporting is in producing an evidence base for community health. Evaluation reports were assessed by a team of reviewers. Practitioner workshops allowed an understanding of the uses of evaluation and what promotes or acts as a barrier to undertaking evaluations.Community health services do undertake a good deal of evaluation. However, reports were not generally explicit in dealing with the principles that underpin community health. Few engaged with program theory or rationale. Typically, reports were of short-term projects with uncertain futures so there may seem little point in considering issues of longterm health outcomes and transferability to other settings. The most important issue from our study is the lack of investment in applied health services research of the sort that will be required to produce the evidence for practice that policy makers desire. The current lack of evidence for community health reflects failure of the system to invest in research and evaluation that is adequately resourced and THIS PAPER DESCRIBES a review of the quality of program evaluations conducted in South Australian community health services and considers how effective these evaluation reports are in terms of producing an evidence base for the work of these services. It also reports on the attitudes of services toward evaluation. Community health in this paper describes the state government-funded primary health care sector that provides comprehensive primary health care services not targeted at a particular population group. Services are mainly non-medical and multidisciplinary, with a range of strategies and an emphasis on health promotion and illness prevention.Over the last decade there has been an increasing interest in evidence-based medicine (EBM) and the application of evidence-based principles to other areas of health practice and policy making. For example, a MEDLINE search for evidence-based medicine revealed one citation in 1992 but more than 13 000 in 2004. 1 EBM mainly uses systematic reviews of randomised and other controlled trials to assess and synthesise evidence about the effectiveness of interven- What is known about the topic? Program evaluations are often conducted for community health initiatives, but there has been little information on the quality of the completed evaluations. What does this paper add? This paper presents the results of a review of program evaluations conducted in South Australian community health services. Although there were a large number of evaluations completed, most were internal and did not provide useful information for policy and planning decisions. What are the implications for practitioners?The authors suggest a need for investment in health services research to improve the quality of program evaluations for decision making.