A participatory evaluation model for Healthier Communities: developing indicators for New Mexico.
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Participatory evaluation models that invite community coalitions to take an active role in developing evaluations of their programs are a natural fit with Healthy Communities initiatives. The author describes the development of a participatory evaluation model for New Mexico's Healthier Communities program. She describes evaluation principles, research questions, and baseline findings. The evaluation model shows the links between process, community-level system impacts, and population health changes. (+info)
Healthy Communities and public policy: four success stories.
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As Healthy Communities initiatives mature, many of them are discovering that their work in building community consensus for improved health care and other quality-of-life issues can be transformed into public policy. This article shows how Healthy Communities initiatives have had important effects on policy making at both the county and state level in several cities and states. (+info)
The city government's role in community health improvement.
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Amid increasing pressures to address complex issues not traditionally assigned to localities, Healthy Cities is seen as a powerful model for community improvement and quality-of-life enhancements for individuals and organizations willing to think beyond the traditional local government management models and responsibilities. As a model for community-oriented government, it offers opportunities for fostering a return to "barnraising" concepts, civic responsibility, participation, tailoring solutions to local circumstances, and the transition of local government to governance models. (+info)
Schools as catalysts for healthy communities.
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Four school superintendents with a shared commitment to students' needs were able to forge a coalition that brought positive change to an entire region. Helping students and their families was a rallying issue for all community agencies. Initially, the four districts joined to apply for grant funding to link schools and social services providers. This served as a model and catalyst for many other cooperative community efforts. (+info)
The school as the center of a healthy community.
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Educational institutions have long been an important focus for public health initiatives. Their readily accessible populations of young people provide an excellent forum for health education, vaccination, and other public health interventions. However, schools can also play an important role as various sectors of the community seek to build new relationships. This article explores opportunities for public health leadership in strengthening schools, an important community asset. (+info)
Healthy Communities and civil discourse: a leadership opportunity for public health professionals.
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The author argues that the Healthy Communities movement provides public health professionals with an opportunity to become not just community leaders but also agents of change in a broad political sense. Extending the work of Kohlberg and other developmental psychologists, the author describes five levels of civil discourse. Professionals who practice the inclusive, consensus-oriented level of discourse, which is consistent with the philosophy of Healthy Communities, can help reinvigorate civil society and democracy as a part of making their communities healthier. (+info)
Improving collaboration between researchers and communities.
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Active collaboration between communities and researchers is critical to developing appropriate public health research strategies that address community concerns. To capture the perspectives of inner-city Seattle communities about issues in community-researcher partnerships, Seattle Partners for Healthy Communities conducted interviews with community members from the ethnically diverse neighborhoods of Central and Southeast Seattle. The results suggest that effective community-researcher collaborations require a paradigm shift from traditional practices to an approach that involves: acknowledging community contributions, recruiting and training minority people to participate in research teams, improving communication, sharing power, and valuing respect and diversity. (+info)
Tools for community-oriented primary care: use of key informant trees in eleven practices.
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Physicians increasingly need information about their communities to use in care of the individual patient. Busy practitioners need feasible methods for collecting this information before they can begin to gather and use it, however. Our objective was to study key informant trees as a practical approach for practice-based gathering of qualitative data from a community. Following a standard protocol, key informant trees were set up in 11 different practices to study the costs, advantages, and problems with their use for this purpose. Time studies showed that each tree took 7 to 11 hours of physician time and 7 hours of clerical time to organize and conduct. The technique appeared to be best suited for two qualitative informational needs: idea generation and explanatory data gathering. Trees appeared most productive where there was stability of physician staff in the practice, where the practice had been present in the community for some years, and where community residents were relatively stable. Response and selection biases are important considerations in use of this technique. (+info)