Governments at all levels (national, state, and local) across the United States are faced with rising demands for health care, limited resources, and increasing inequality in health. A community health needs assessment has a central part to play, enabling public health practitioners, managers, and policymakers to identify those in greatest need and to ensure that healthcare resources are used effectively to maximize health improvement. What is one way in which a community health needs assessment has been used to address a health need that you are familiar with in your community?
As you respond to your classmates, discuss the health needs assessment they identified and whether or not it has also been used within your community.
ANSWER AND THEN REPLY TO MY CLASSMATES RESPONSE TO THE ABOVE QUESTIONS AND EXPLAIN WHY YOU AGREE? (A MINIMUM OF 125 WORDS or MORE EACH QUESTION)
CLASSMATES POST
Evidence-based public health (EBPH) is a tool that should be used in the formulation of new public health programs.
The EBPH concept was based on another program called Evidence-based medicine (EBM) that was created in 1992 thanks to Cochrane’s seminal work. EBM has helped eliminate thousands of medical treatments that were not working but were brought to light when thousands of cases were studied in the medical literature and checks were made. In Public Health when we study EBPH we must use the seven steps of Brownson and colleagues. These consist of:
1.-Evaluation of a problem in the community, for example, obesity in high school children in San Diego County.
2.- Quantify the problem of obesity. How many children are overweight and how many are already obese, what is their distribution by age, sex? What is the distribution of cases according to their races?
3.-Develop an initial program. After deciding that there is a problem and we have already quantified it, we must implement a program where we will try to reduce the consumption of carbohydrates in school lunches, programs to increase the physical activity of young people.
4.- Search for scientific information about the problem. With the help of databases, we will be able to compare programs that are being used in other parts of the country and the world.
5.-Develop programs and policies. After receiving our statistics of the program that we implemented for the term of a year and after consulting other programs and the advice of the specialists now if we are in conditions to approve a program for the whole county that we will call Childhood Obesity Action Plan (COAP) that We will carry out in the next 36 months and to which we will invite various stakeholders to support us to reduce obesity in our county.
6.- Develop an action plan. The action plan depends on several factors that must work efficiently. Educating the population about the risks of obesity, for which we need the media and schools. Provide foods with low calorie and carbohydrate content Eliminate if possible the ingestion of Sugar-Sweetened Beverages (SSBs) and stimulate physical exercise among other aspects of the plan.
7.- Evaluation of the program and policies. Some of the methods of evaluating whether we are being effective in our fight against obesity. The Body Mass Index (BMI) measurement can be an excellent measurement that shows that our program is working.
It is known that advances in public health programs occur in times of crisis, hot issues and are also highly influenced by the wishes of political leaders. Some of the problems are related to funding cuts to implement programs that can help communities solve health problems, but there is a great deficit due to the low training of people working in public health. Less than half of the people who work in public health, have an education or a career related to public health, being few people who can show an MPH, so it takes a lot of education in public health issues to be able to have the best results.
Reference:
Erwin, P. C., Brownson, R. C., & Scutchfield, F. D. (2017). Scutchfield and Kecks principles of public health practice. Australia: Cengage Learning.
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