Building a Culture of Health at the Neighborhood Level Through Governance Councils (original) (raw)
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Public Health Reports, 2001
The Urban Research Center at the Center for Urban Epidemiologic Studies brings together community members and researchers working in Harlem, New York. A Community Advisory Board (CAB) composed of community members, service providers, public health professionals, and researchers was formed to assist the Center's research and interventions and to guide community partnerships. Through a collaborative process, the CAB identified three public health problems-substance use, infectious diseases, and asthma-as action priorities. To deal with substance use, the Center created a Web-based resource guide for service providers and a "survival guide" for substance users, designed to improve access to community services. To deal with infectious diseases, the Center is collaborating with local community-based organizations on an intervention that trains injection drug users to serve as peer mentors to motivate behavior change among other injection drug users. To deal with asthma, the Center is collaborating with community child care providers on an educational intervention to increase asthma awareness among day care teaching staff, enhance communication between staff and families, and improve the selfmanagement skills of children with asthma. The Center's experience has demonstrated that active communities and responsive researchers can establish partnerships that improve community health.
Journal of Community Health, 2011
Decreasing health disparities must increase access to care, improve health education and ease navigating the health care system. Community Health Workers (CHW) take on these tasks in professional and culturally competent manners. The Healthy Families Brooklyn (HFB) Program serves residents in two public housing developments in Brooklyn, NY. Healthy Families Advocates (HFA), a type of CHW, are at the core of HFB. Curriculum development for, training of and services provided by the 10 HFA over 19 months are described. Pre and post knowledge assessments of HFAs are analyzed. Data from HFA surveys regarding training were analyzed using grounded theory methods. HFA served 172 unique clients at 222 visits. Services offered include accessing public benefits, health education, and connection to hospitals. There was a significant increase between pre and post assessment knowledge scores (P \ 0.01). Taking temperature, building trust, and communicating care and connection emerged as themes related to interpersonal skills used by the HFA. The HFA are committed to moving clients forward in their health knowledge and behaviors. Themes from the HFA survey closely mirrored the HFA training curriculum. Lessons learned pertaining to training needs, data collection, and supervision are explored. The HFB program is a model way of working in communities in New York City and expansion with faith-based groups and other housing development communities is underway. Engaging communities to improve access, screening, prevention and treatment is paramount to the nation's health and the success of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. CHW's role in this mission is integral.
Journal of Urban Health, 2008
Improving community health "from the ground up" entails a comprehensive ecological approach, deep involvement of community-based entities, and addressing social determinants of population health status. Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of the Surgeon General, and other authorities have called for public health to be an "inter-sector" enterprise, few models have surfaced that feature local health departments as a key part of the collaborative model for effecting community-level change. This paper presents evaluation findings and lessons learned from the Partnership for the Public's Health (PPH), a comprehensive community initiative that featured a central role for local health departments with their community partners. Funded by The California Endowment, PPH provided technical and financial resources to 39 community partnerships in 14 local health department jurisdictions in California to promote community and health department capacity building and community-level policy and systems change designed to produce long-term improvements in population health. The evaluation used multiple data sources to create progress ratings for each partnership in five goal areas related to capacity building, community health improvement programs, and policy and systems change. Overall results were generally positive; in particular, of the 37 partnerships funded continuously throughout the 5 years of the initiative, between 25% and 40% were able to make a high level of progress in each of the Initiative's five goal areas. Factors associated with partnership success were also identified by local evaluators. These results showed that health departments able to work effectively with community groups had strong, committed leaders who used creative financing mechanisms, inclusive planning processes, organizational changes, and open communication to promote collaboration with the communities they served. KEYWORDS Community health partnerships, Local public health departments, Communitybased health promotion, Resident involvement, Collaboration, Social determinants of health.
Local Health Department Collaborative Capacity to Improve Population Health
Frontiers in public health services & systems research, 2014
Local health departments (LHDs) can more effectively develop and strengthen community health partnerships when leaders focus on building partnership collaborative capacity (PCC), including a multisector infrastructure for population health improvement. Using the 2008 National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) Profile survey, we constructed an overall measure of LHD PCC comprised of the five dimensions: outcomes-based advocacy, vision-focus balance, systems orientation, infrastructure development, and community linkages. We conducted a series of regression analyses to examine the extent to which LHD characteristics and contextual factors were related to PCC. The most developed PCC dimension was vision-focus balance, while infrastructure development and community linkages were the least developed. In multivariate analyses, LHDs that were locally governed (rather than governed by the state), LHDs without local boards of health, and LHDs providing a wider range of...
Ethnicity & Disease, 2018
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In the past few decades, scholars have begun to establish ethical principles for public health engagement. A key tension has been how to reconcile public health improvement with local autonomy in decision making so as to express respect for community members' on-theground experience. This article describes the experience of one children's hospital in learning to ethically engage a surrounding community in conversations about housing development in partnership with a local faith-based development organization. Making Neighborhoods Better In 2008, amidst the throes of economic recession, a major crossroads confronted the Nationwide Children's Hospital (NCH) in Columbus, Ohio's South Side. The hospital had decided to remain in its location of 126 years and invest more deeply in the community. The collapse of the nation's housing markets had left hundreds of vacant properties in the area just beyond the hospital's campus, and it was clear that addressing housing was key to improving pediatric health outcomes for 3 reasons: (1) housing plays a documented role in the health of children, 1 and this neighborhood had severe housing shortage; (2) outreach efforts made clear that housing was a neighborhood priority; and (3) because of instability in housing, children were moving too frequently to make school-based or neighborhood-based programs effective. Accordingly, the new hospital administration was committed to effecting change in the neighborhood.