Paper Example on Health Planning vs Community Development: Analyzing Health Assessment Plans

Introduction

One of the most important steps to generate gainful improvements in the health sector is to ensure effective community health assessment plans are employed. There are two popular approaches in community health assessment. These are the health planning and community development approaches. This paper is in response to the analysis of the media title titled Health Planning Versus Community Development Approaches that was developed from research in on health assessment plans. The paper seeks to identify, highlight, and explain each community development approach that was used in the assessment and intervention of the community health issues and how the best approach can be replicated in the assessment of health issues in Centerville, Illinois. The community has been determined to, among other things, suffer from increased teenage pregnancies and drug abuse. According to Salas-Wright, Vaughn, Ugalde & Todic, (2015), these are related and some of the most dominant issues related to increasing poverty. Based on the analysis of the health issues, the community development approach is the best approach for the Centerville community. It incorporates key people in the community, the government, the legal agencies, law enforcement, the volunteers from diverse places, the victims, the local community, health, and academic institution to find solutions of the health issue.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Process of Selecting the Most Appropriate Health Assessment Approach

Various processes would be involved in selecting the best-suited approach for the Centerville community.

Collecting data from communities that are similar to Centerville where the strategy has been effective

Data should inform the best approach. In-Depth research that incorporates aspects of both qualitative and quantitative approach should be used. The data that is currently available from the community does not suffice to explain the situation of the ground fully. It is mainly quantitative. Therefore, a qualitative survey would be employed to gather facts, explain processes, and measure the perception of society towards health issues (Reeve, Humphreys & Wakerman, 2015).

Review of the previous approach with the key stakeholders

The pre-existing health assessment in Centerville should be crucially evaluated to determine why it failed, its weakness and measure it against its key performance indicators. If it is established, that it was not sufficient, then a different approach should be considered.

Assessment of strategies that are research-based and can solve the health issues in Centerville

There are databases for dynamic processes and approaches that have been implemented in other communities. Before settling for any approach, such databases must be reviewed to assess similarities and difference and gather learnings from their outcomes.

• Selection of the appropriate strategy to address Centerville problems.
• The approach should be based on the identified community problems, the identified population, and the expected solutions
• Development of the most appropriate evaluation design.
• The intended outcomes and key performance indicators should be used to inform the assessment approach.
• Identification of resources available to support the approach.

The resource feasibility is the budgetary phase of choosing the plan. There is a need to evaluate whether the approach that is selected for Centerville community is within the financial, human and capital resources available from the federal government, the state government and the diverse organization that would offer their resources towards interventions.

Identification of an implementation team, data collection and handling, and monitoring and evaluation team.

Monitoring and evaluation and health needs assessment are critical in health assessment. Both are research-related and involves systematic methods through which the health issues that are facing the target community can be reviewed (Smithies & Webster, 2018). Therefore, community health assessment plan should be decided by the findings from these processes.

Identification of staff development needs.

The plan should be developed with the understanding of human resource needs and availability. The team that is selected to implement the approach should have the highest acceptability and bound to generate the best impact (Lin & Wang, 2016).

Justification of the Choice of the Health Assessment Approach

Based on the analysis of the issues surrounding this community, the community development approach is the best-suited health assessment approach. The approach is one of the most reputable and fastest developing interventions and assessment approach that involves bringing members of the society together to take action against issues or a matter that is deemed to be of massive significance to them. This involves putting in place the required infrastructure, procedures, and processes that will increase people's access to wealth, social, mental and physical wellbeing, opportunities, wealth and justice (Zanin, & Piercy, 2019). The absence of this infrastructure has been a significant concern for the people of Centerville. Therefore, the approach will initiate infrastructure building processes which is a key milestone in an intervention. As a result of the dominant poverty in the community, related challenges such as gang activities, trafficking, and employment, among others are bound to happen. They are the primary determinant factors of early pregnancy and addiction concerns (Wall-Wieler, Roos & Nickel, 2016). These are a community-based problem, and the approach that does not include the community in developing and implementing the solution would be not effective.

Another great aspect of this approach is its changeability. The changeability of the approach must also be evaluated at all points (Field, Vila, Runk, Mactaggart, Rosewell & Nathan, 2018). This involves the evaluation of whether it is possible and within reasonable means to change the determinant factor and the health conditions during the assessment. Another key advantage is the acceptability of the assessment approach. The small diversity within the community is a significant strength (Jagosh, Bush, Salsberg, Macaulay, Greenhalgh, Wong & Pluye, 2015). The plan should be developed with the understanding of changes that have the highest acceptability and bound to generate the best impact (Lin & Wang, 2016). However, there are diverse challenges with the approach. The community development approach is capital and labor-intensive (Artiga & Hinton, 2018). Its systematic nature requires the employment of long-term infrastructure, including full-time community health workers and other health and commonalty development experts. Therefore, it is not a very appropriate approach to use in issues where immediate results are required. However, it has a more significant and longer-lasting impact on the long-run.

References

Artiga, S., & Hinton, E. (2018). Beyond health care: the role of social determinants in promoting health and health equity. Health, 20, 1-10. Retrieved from http://www.ccapcomcare.org/Newsletters/2018-05%20INSIGHT%20KFF%20Brief.pdf

Field, E., Vila, M., Runk, L., Mactaggart, F., Rosewell, A., & Nathan, S. (2018). Lessons for health program monitoring and evaluation in a low resource setting. Rural and Remote Health. Rural Remote Health, 18, 4596. Retrieved from https://www.rrh.org.au/journal/article/4596

Jagosh, J., Bush, P. L., Salsberg, J., Macaulay, A. C., Greenhalgh, T., Wong, G., ... & Pluye, P. (2015). A realist evaluation of community-based participatory research: partnership synergy, trust building and related ripple effects. BMC public health, 15(1), 725. Retrieved from https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-015-1949-1

Lin, P., & Wang, N. (2016). Building portfolio fragility functions to support scalable community resilience assessment. Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure, 1(3-4), 108-122. Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/78f2/0e41d574c96e5ce89a4e23f9984e1d6ab47c.pdf

Reeve, C., Humphreys, J., & Wakerman, J. (2015). A comprehensive health service evaluation and monitoring framework. Evaluation and program planning, 53, 91-98. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149718915000932

Salas-Wright, C. P., Vaughn, M. G., Ugalde, J., & Todic, J. (2015). Substance use and teen pregnancy in the United States: evidence from the NSDUH 2002-2012. Addictive behaviors, 45, 218-225. Retrieved from doi:10.1016/j.addbeh.2015.01.039

Smithies, J., & Webster, G. (2018). Community involvement in health: from passive recipients to active participants. Routledge. Retrieved from https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429460739

Wall-Wieler, E., Roos, L. L., & Nickel, N. C. (2016). Teenage pregnancy: the impact of maternal adolescent childbearing and older sister's teenage pregnancy on a younger sister. BMC pregnancy and childbirth, 16(1), 120. doi:10.1186/s12884-016-0911-2

Zanin, A. C., & Piercy, C. W. (2019). The Structuration of Community-Based Mental Health Care: A Duality Analysis of a Volunteer Group's Local Agency. Qualitative health research, 29(2), 184-197. https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/27631/Zanin_2018.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y