Health intervention strategy - Assignment Example

Health intervention strategy Community intervention projects are initiated to promote health and to help in preventing diseases and epidemics. Such programs possess certain uniqueness in that they tend to involve large communities as the primary subjects of intervention and use different strategies to initiate change within such target groups. Such strategies may involve any component ranging from education and organization to the institution of policies to affect such interventions.The primary necessity for intervention is based on its potential to produce improvements across a wide section of the population, thereby helping target specific areas where the source of the disease is located.

By changing the various norms and policies that help ascertain the individual risks associated with such diseases and by integrating such interventions into public infrastructure, such programs can enhance the sustainability of the community by inducing a level of competency and control within the target population (David Jenkins, 2003).Community based participation is one of the several approaches used in intervention programs that helps design policies and methodologies to enable the elimination of health disparities along racial and ethnic lines.

One such example of a participatory approach can be found in the case of the Healthy People 2010 program instituted to challenge individuals and communities into participating to ensure better health and longevity. Partnering in such approaches through local community level agencies in order to undertake such assessments has helped assess the effects of social change (Brian Smedley, 2008). In this context, community based participatory strategy ensures that the research effort has a similar relevance as the ultimate outcome in the elimination of any health disparities that exist within communities, thereby helping empower them to allow for a promotion of individual health.

Although several such participatory projects have been encouraged with a view to enhancing community involvement, it has been found that the effectiveness of these efforts has been limited due to the discrepancies in data used to collect the underlying information. For example, data pertaining to behaviors and risk at an individual level often influence the health outcome, and are thus critical to the formulation of strategies in eliminating health-based disparities. However, such information is often unavailable across several communities (John Ahier, 2005).

In addition, participatory programs do take into consideration the diversity that exists across communities, such as the difference in needs of the Asian and African American communities. However, data available in this context is often inadequate and needs further effort to be translated into effective programs requiring the need for additional policy making (Deborah Perry, 2007). The available data is often based across states or sourced from national level information, thereby limiting the capability to decipher the social aspects that influence health at a local level.

It is therefore necessary to gather information that can capture the trends in health along cultural and community levels in order to project the various characteristics and perspectives that exist in different communities.References1. David Jenkins (2003), Building better health: a handbook of behavioral change. Paho Scientific Publication.2. Brian Smedley (2008), Promoting health: intervention strategies from social and behavioral research. National Academic Press.3. John Ahier (2005), Contemporary education policy.

London: Routledge.4. Deborah Perry (2007), Social & emotional health in early childhood: building bridges between services & systems. University of Michigan.