The program is committed to community-based behavioral health prevention program to promote the behavioral health of all community members. The program will play a key role in preventing disease, improving health, nutrition, and physical fitness, and quality of life of community members.
a) Mission & Vision
The program is guided by the mission of improving community health through understanding the health needs of the community and facilitate behavior change to prevent disease and improve the overall health of the community. The vision of the program is to create a healthier population with reduced health problems. The program is guided by the values of equity, human rights, and the belief that everyone has a right to lead a healthy and productive life. The stakeholders will research to identify the health needs of the community to inform program, intervention, decision-making, and policy.
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b) Theoretical Knowledge for working with Individuals and Family
Health workers work in different settings; some of them work in a community setting. Public health officials including community health workers (CHWs) and social workers are trained to serve in a community setting. The program will bring together all the stakeholders to facilitate access to health services (Basch et al., 2019). The stakeholders will aim to increase health knowledge, self-sufficiency, and prevention through outreach, community clinic, counseling, social support, and advocacy.
The program focuses on behavioral health, specifically physical activity and a proper diet. Every Friday, the community will meet in a Town Hall to engage in a discussion about health. During this time, community health workers will also offer free clinics and testing to encourage people who do not go for regular checkups. The public will also engage in different forms of physical activities including jogging, aerobics, and Zumba. Every month there will be a 10K run for the community. The winners will be given small prizes, but it will bring the community together to engage in fitness activities. Nutritionists will also advise the community members on simple ways to change their diets to lose weight and reduce their risks for many lifestyle diseases.
c) Stakeholders
The stakeholders fall into three groups:
• Stakeholders involved in program operations such as managers, staff members, partners, and funding agencies. The staff members include health care workers, paraprofessionals, nutritionists, and counselors.
• Stakeholders served by the program including patients, community members, local officials, and advocacy groups.
• Stakeholders interested in the program’s result. There are individuals in a position to make decisions concerning the project such as funding agencies, for example, the CDC and Department of Health. Coalition members and the general public is also interested in the results of the project.
d) Roles and Responsibilities for Stakeholders
The classification of the stakeholders shows that they have different roles and responsibilities. For example, the program’s management/leadership will bring all the stakeholders together by coordinating all the activities. The health workers including public health workers, nutritionists, and paraprofessionals will engage with community members through free testing clinics, and different clinics to address community needs. Nutritionists will educate community healthy eating habits and physical fitness while the counselor will discuss the mental health issues. Partners from funding institutions such as the CDC and the Department of Health will engage in oversight activities with the program’s managers.
e) Behavioral and Psychological barriers
Some of the barriers to the health program include lack of knowledge, poor perception of healthy behavior, and educational disparities. Buchner et al. (2014) add that that the behavioral barriers are also influenced by interpersonal and environmental barriers such as culture and social norms, lack of social support, and community perception of health. Environmental barriers such as inaccessibility of health facilities or stores selling healthy food options.
f) Recommendation for Behavior Modification
The program aims to recommend social and behavioral factors that have profound effects on community health. On an individual level, individuals will be advised on risk behaviors linked to their personal, social, and economic conditions (Bahraminejad et al., 2014). The program will address all these factors individually and on a community level. The program will not focus on a single intervention; instead, it will address all the social and behavioral factors from the individual elements, interpersonal, institutional, community, and policy levels. For example, the community requires easy access to affordable and healthy food rather than processed food. This issue can be addressed through a community garden project or opening a grocery shop in the neighborhood.
BEHAVIORAL HEALTH PREVENTION SUMMARY REPORT
The health sector recognizes that social and environmental factors affect the health status of an individual and the community often causing disparities. For example, inaccessibility to nutritious food restricts one's diet making an individual or the entire community vulnerable to a host of lifestyle diseases. Social and environmental factors often cause disparities in healthcare; they are the reasons as to why specific populations have higher rates of certain conditions in comparison to other communities, thus the need for community-wide interventions. According to Basch et al. (2019), community-wide interventions focus on creating a conducive physical and social environment for the acquisition and maintenance of healthy lifestyles. The program comes with opportunities for social and physical change, whether by encouraging the community to eat healthy food or even changing the public spaces to enable them to exercise.
Behavioral health prevention programs are a form of community health programs. Community health programs are gaining popularity for their ability to effectively address the health needs of a particular community by taking into consideration their health concerns, resources, social and political perspectives. The first step in the creation of the program was to identify the strategy. A community program can be biologic, behavioral, political or structural (Basch et al., 2019). A behavioral program focuses on changing the behavior of individuals within the community as well as the whole community.
The second step was the formulation of the mission and vision for the program. The mission and vision are related to behavioral aspects and the health needs of the community obtained from broad scanning. Health statistics provide the most reliable information on community health, but there is a need to involve the community from the beginning of the program. The community is suffering from many lifestyle diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular conditions, and obesity; thus a behavioral program is the best program (Bolton et al., 2017). The mission of the program is to improve community health through an understanding of community health needs and to facilitate behavior change to improve the overall health. The program will focus on education and social change among other strategies to show the community the importance of healthy behaviors such as exercise, diet, and regular checkups.
The next stage is involving different stakeholders. Community health projects bring together individuals from the health sector, community, policymakers, and private sector to address the health issues within the community. Aforementioned, the stakeholders in the program fall under three classes according to their roles and responsibilities. Patients and community members will benefit from the services offered by the program while program staff members, partners, managers, and funding agencies are responsible for providing the services. According to Bahraminejad et al. (2014), the foundation for stakeholder participation and engagement often starts with community readiness, which is why it is essential to involve the community from the early stages of the program. The community willingness and commitment comes from informing them about the benefits of the program and engaging them.
Each stakeholder serves an essential purpose. There should be mutual collaborations between the stakeholders, for example, community health workers must work together with counselors, nutritionists, and program directors ensure the program achieves its mission and goals. Working with a multi-agency can be very challenging. There is a need to differentiate between stakeholders and agencies that are not “stakeholders” in the real sense (Das et al., 2016). For example, a funding agency is considered a stakeholder, but it is not involved in the day to day operations of the program. The program manager/ committee has to engage with all the stakeholders to build mutual trust and address the issues of power imbalances, capacity and the role of each stakeholder. The manager must demonstrate expertise in leading a multi-agency team and in developing a partnership with the community.
Aside from the challenges that come with managing a multi-agency team, the program will encounter a host of behavioral and psychological barriers. The goal of the program is to eliminate health challenges and barriers within the community. Barriers such as lack of knowledge, lack of time to exercise, poor perception towards health practitioners and facilities, and educational disparities can affect individual health. Studies show that poor health is related to lower educational attainment (Harris et al., 2015). Community barriers include factors in the social and environmental such as cultural norms, inaccessibility of fresh produce, or inaccessibility of healthcare services. According to Harris et al. (2015), barriers are essential predictors of behavior change. Barriers prevent individuals from engaging in health-promoting behavior. For instance, an individual who believes that he/she comes from a family of big people and that weight is genetic is less likely to engage in exercise or a proper diet to lose weight. The stakeholders must pay attention to all the barriers if they want to effect real change in the community.
The behavioral health program borrows from the many community programs that have succeeded in effecting change. The success of the community programs is seen in the results. A survey will be conducted before the implementation of the program to identify essential factors regarding community health, such as their engagement in physical activities and diet (Carter et al., 2016). A survey will also be conducted during the implementation and at the end of the program to identify the changes/ successes of the program. Additional evaluation methods that will be used include environmental assessments, community focus groups, and stakeholder interviews and surveys if the evaluation findings will show an increase in physical activity, a positive change in diet, and access to healthy food.
In conclusion, the program borrows from the many community programs already in place. The program is guided by the mission of improving community health using a behavioral strategy. The main focus is physical activity and changing eating habits. Therefore, the stakeholders will work together to address the behavioral and psychological barriers. The program will succeed if the stakeholders collaborate, including the community. The program’s leaders have to engage with the community from the beginning to encourage participation and engagement.
References
Bahraminejad, N., Ibrahim, F., Riji, H. M., Majdzadeh, R., Hamzah, A., & Keshavarz Mohammadi, N. (2014). Partner's engagement in community-based health promotion programs: a case study of professional partner's experiences and perspectives in Iran. Health promotion international , 30 (4), 963-975.
Basch, C. H., Kernan, W. D., & MacLean, S. A. (2019). Improving understanding about dental health issues in college students. Journal of prevention & intervention in the community , 47 (1), 25-31.
Bolton, K. A., Kremer, P., Gibbs, L., Waters, E., Swinburn, B., & de Silva, A. (2017). The outcomes of health-promoting communities: being active eating well initiative—a community-based obesity prevention intervention in Victoria, Australia. International Journal of Obesity , 41 (7), 1080.
Buchner, D. L., Brenner, J. L., Kabakyenga, J., Teddy, K., Maling, S., Barigye, C., & Singhal, N. (2014). Stakeholders' perceptions of integrated community case management by community health workers: a post-intervention qualitative study. PLoS One , 9 (6), e98610.
Carter, S. R., Walker, A., Abdul-Latif, S., Maurer, L., Masunungure, D., Tedaldi, E., & Patterson, F. (2016). Nice to your heart: A pilot community-based intervention to improve heart health behaviours in urban residents. Health Education Journal , 75 (3), 306-317.
Das, J. K., Salam, R. A., Lassi, Z. S., Khan, M. N., Mahmood, W., Patel, V., & Bhutta, Z. A. (2016). Interventions for adolescent mental health: an overview of systematic reviews. Journal of Adolescent Health , 59 (4), S49-S60.
Harris, J., Croot, L., Thompson, J., & Springett, J. (2016). How stakeholder participation can contribute to systematic reviews of complex interventions. J Epidemiol Community Health , 70 (2), 207-214.
