The 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health

Objective: We designed the School Health Action, Planning and Evaluation System (SHAPES) to engage local health and education systems in planning, tailoring and evaluating tobacco control initiatives based on evidence and provide a platform to study the processes and structures required for effective knowledge exchange in tobacco control.

Methods: SHAPES consists of three elements: (a) a low-cost, machine readable tobacco use questionnaire that can be administered to all students in a school (Grades 6-12), (b) a school administrator questionnaire to assess tobacco policy and programs in the school, and (c) a computer-generated feedback report for the school.

Results: Demand for SHAPES has been high. SHAPES has been administered in more than 550 Canadian schools since 2000. Currently, it is being implemented in a sample of 110 secondary schools (~110,000 students) selected to be representative of eight public health regions in the province of Ontario, Canada. We have worked with provincial tobacco control coalitions to build understanding of knowledge brokering between health and education systems for evidence-based knowledge use. Future SHAPES efforts include the development of a student eating behaviour module, development of a database that facilitates local access to and analysis of data, collection of the “stories” of action on student health and efforts to integrate the data system as part of existing public health and education systems to use evidence for practice.