Identifying and Chronicling Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program Achievements With "Success Stories".

Success stories showcase a public health program's progress toward achieving population health objectives. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program (CLPPP) develops "success stories" in partnership with state and local cooperative agreement recipients as one way to highlight lead poisoning prevention achievements. Success stories can be used to inform policy makers, stakeholders, and the general public. Over time, the process for collecting and developing CLPPP "successes" has evolved. Early efforts to collect success stories from funded recipients resulted in broad or unfocused reports that diminished the program's perceived impact. CDC's CLPPP revised the approach to success story development in order to better articulate the context, intervention or activity, and results related to programs' successes. The new approach results in stronger products ensuring that both CDC and program recipients can use the success stories to demonstrate achievement of key program objectives. We describe how success stories can be used to identify, chronicle, and mobilize public health program achievements using the example of lead poisoning prevention. Success stories allow programs to increase mission awareness, build stakeholder support, generate community interest, and collectively demonstrate progress toward meeting national program objectives.