What is Participatory Quality Development?

Knowledge of All Actors Coming Together

Participatory Quality Development means constantly improving health promotion and prevention measures through an equitable collaboration among a project, the target group, financial sponsors and, possibly, other actors. A characteristic of this collaboration is inclusiveness and participation by the project staff and, above all, by the target group to the highest degree possible in the four phases of developing interventions: Needs assessment, intervention planning, implementation and evaluation.
Participatory Quality Development emphasizes the local knowledge of the participants and supports them in using, reflecting upon and expanding this knowledge. To achieve this end, participatory methods of data collection and intervention planning are used. The resulting quality assurance measures are customized, feasible, useful, participatory and reliable.

Customized means tailored to specific local conditions including the composition of the target group and the mandate, mission, and capacity of the organization providing health promotion and prevention services.

Feasible means that the time needed for the quality assurance measures is reasonable. That is, they are limited to that what is necessary and they can be integrated into the daily work routine.

Quality assurance measures are useful when they result in outcomes which can be translated directly in ways to improve services.

Participatory quality assurance measures take into account the perspective of the workers and users. The local knowledge of the (potential) users should be considered at all stages of project planning and implementation.

Reliable quality assurance measures enable a critical look at health promoting or preventive services and are based on scientifically recognized methods.


Participatory Quality Development is in the tradition of action research which is internationally known in public health primarily by the term "community-based participatory research.” With respect to the verifiability of the success of interventions, the emphasis in Participatory Quality Development lies on practice-based evidence