Checklists help pinpoint most effective projects
Checklists help pinpoint most effective projects
Start on a firm foundation
Identifying community issues that must be addressed to improve the health of the residents is the beginning of a healthy community initiative. The right projects must be chosen for the initiative to be successful.
With success or failure looming, it is sometimes difficult to make a decision. The task at hand can be overwhelming, so those on steering committees and task forces need to break the projects into small pieces that become manageable, says Joan Twiss, MA, director of Sacramento-based California Healthy Cities and Communities.
Create some sort of checklist to arrive at a meeting of the minds, suggests Twiss. Groups might ask these questions:
· What needs to be done?
· What resources do we have?
· What kind of political support do we have?
· How ready are we, working together as a group, to take on the mountain vs. the small hills?
When the city of Duarte, CA, for example, identified teenage pregnancy as a community issue that needed to be addressed, the group first sought to determine whether any programs were in place that targeted teen pregnancy. There were not, so a committee researched programs around the country that could be set up on a slim budget. They uncovered a Mentor Mom program in Georgia that was established to help prevent child abuse. "We found that with minimal money and staffing, the mentor program was extremely effective. Therefore, we used this model for our program," says Dora Barilla, MPH, CHES, teen coordinator for the Mentor Mom Program in Duarte.
The goal of the Duarte Mentor Mom program is to ensure that teens give birth to babies that weigh at least five pounds, and that they are back in school eight weeks after the birth of the baby. After one year, all teens enrolled in the program who gave birth have met the goals.
In Anderson County, SC, Partners for a Healthy Community decided to take on a formidable project to help improve access to health care. The initiative is in the process of replicating the Boise, ID-based Healthwise Communities Project by putting a self-care handbook in every household. The handbook gives readers a Web site address, lists the locations of kiosks in the community that provide additional health information, and gives the phone number for an information line staffed by nurses. (For details on this project, see article, p.112.)
The initiative is asking managed care companies and medical insurance plans to help share the high expense and is using the Boise figures to convince them, says Russell Harris, CFRE, executive director of Partners for a Healthy Community. For example, according to facts gathered by the Healthwise project, placing a handbook in every home should reduce physician office visits by one per family annually.
A series of task forces were used in Hampton County, SC, to come up with projects to address the four issues (economics, education, health and lifestyles, and inter-group relations) identified by the healthy community initiative, called PRO (Pride in yourself; Respect for others; Opportunity for all) Hampton County. To help in program selection, criteria were developed during a community forum for the task forces to follow, says Peggy Parker, EdD, interim executive director for the project. The criteria included:
· Was the project something the task force would be able to do?
· Is the task force divided on the project? All must agree for the project to be acceptable.
· Is someone else already doing the project? If so, the task force does not need to do it.
· Does the project get to the root of the problem?
· Is the project countywide?
The task force on inter-group relations suggested that PRO Hampton County create study circles, small interracial groups of 12 to 14 people, to discuss race relations. The plan met all the criteria. It was a project that could be done countywide, no one else was doing it, and it could help the community get at the root of the problem.
"The community knows best what needs to be done. If you go where the energy is, and as long as it is soundly planned and inclusive, you will have some success on which to build," says Twiss.
Subscribe Now for Access
You have reached your article limit for the month. We hope you found our articles both enjoyable and insightful. For information on new subscriptions, product trials, alternative billing arrangements or group and site discounts please call 800-688-2421. We look forward to having you as a long-term member of the Relias Media community.