Evaluating the implementation of Smile4life: a theoretically driven exploration
type: CreativeWork
description: My thesis is a theoretically informed evaluation of the implementation of an ongoing national policy intervention: Smile4life, Scotland’s national oral health improvement programme for people experiencing homelessness. This work was initially conceived following a process evaluation of Smile4life implementation, which revealed that Smile4life practitioners working in NHS Boards varied in the speed of their adoption of the programme and in how they implemented Smile4life. This original work (Beaton and Freeman, 2016) uncovered certain questions relating to the practitioners’ working behaviours and the role of policy and organisational level factors associated with implementation. Therefore, the basis of the research was to delve deeper, using a theory-informed approach and to understand and evaluate how Smile4life was being implemented from a range of perspectives, including Smile4life practitioners and NHS Board oral health managers. The overall aim was to evaluate the live implementation of this ongoing policy intervention, by identifying the organisational and practitioner factors that influence the delivery and implementation of Smile4life. Following a narrative review of health and homelessness policy and a scoping review of oral health and homelessness interventions, this thesis details the theoretical, methodological and ethical considerations of this research before presenting the four studies that form the main part of this work. A range of qualitative and quantitative methods were used, and theories adopted, to inform the data collection and data analysis over a series of four studies, to achieve the aim of the thesis and examine the complexity of Smile4life behaviours from various perspectives. The adoption of different theoretical lenses and a mixed methods approach reflected the complexity of the Smile4life intervention and enabled the ability to adapt to the changing nature of the intervention as the research proceeded. Each study will now be summarised…
abstract: My thesis is a theoretically informed evaluation of the implementation of an ongoing national policy intervention: Smile4life, Scotland’s national oral health improvement programme for people experiencing homelessness. This work was initially conceived following a process evaluation of Smile4life implementation, which revealed that Smile4life practitioners working in NHS Boards varied in the speed of their adoption of the programme and in how they implemented Smile4life. This original work (Beaton and Freeman, 2016) uncovered certain questions relating to the practitioners’ working behaviours and the role of policy and organisational level factors associated with implementation. Therefore, the basis of the research was to delve deeper, using a theory-informed approach and to understand and evaluate how Smile4life was being implemented from a range of perspectives, including Smile4life practitioners and NHS Board oral health managers. The overall aim was to evaluate the live implementation of this ongoing policy intervention, by identifying the organisational and practitioner factors that influence the delivery and implementation of Smile4life. Following a narrative review of health and homelessness policy and a scoping review of oral health and homelessness interventions, this thesis details the theoretical, methodological and ethical considerations of this research before presenting the four studies that form the main part of this work. A range of qualitative and quantitative methods were used, and theories adopted, to inform the data collection and data analysis over a series of four studies, to achieve the aim of the thesis and examine the complexity of Smile4life behaviours from various perspectives. The adoption of different theoretical lenses and a mixed methods approach reflected the complexity of the Smile4life intervention and enabled the ability to adapt to the changing nature of the intervention as the research proceeded. Each study will now be summarised…
author: Beaton, Laura
language: eng
keywords: Dentistry, Oral Health, Homelessness, Qualitative, Mixed methods, Behaviour change
date published: 2020
date modified: 2026-07-24T02:08:52Z
provider: University of Dundee
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Dundee