| Summary: | The Healthy Alberta Communities (HAC) is a community-based chronic disease prevention project that draws on a wide spectrum of community-initiated interventions undertaken as a cluster in four Alberta communities since 2005. HAC-funded collaborative projects are undertaken with local stakeholders. Community stakeholders who buy in contributed their own resources in kind in the collaborative process. These in kind resources are considered HAC's indirect cost from a societal perspective since stakeholders forgo the benefit of using these resources for themselves, a forgone best alternative. This study proposes a methodology to identify, catalogue and count these in kind resources, called indirect cost, which will be used in HAC economic evaluation. Methodological challenges of identifying, cataloguing and counting both direct anad indirect costs for a cluster of diverse interventions, and the manner with which these challenges were addressed, are explained. Both direct and indirect cost data that span up to the first 24 months in two HAC communities were analyzed. Some results included are: (1)in kind resources are counted in number of in kind person-hours; (2) a combined total of 11,483 in kind person-hours from community stakeholders were catalogued and counted over an eight-month period; (3) in a monetary context, a suggested typical operating expenditure to generate one in kind person-hour using a HAC model (one head office, two community offices) was $15.58. This is the first study to directly measure resources donated in kind in public health. === Epidemiology
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