Community-based interventions

Summary

Public health practitioners who design community-based, health interventions base their work on evidence that social and environmental processes impact upon health and wellbeing, and contribute to health decline, morbidity and mortality. Furthermore, rather than assuming that negative environmental conditions are fixed and immutable aspects of industrial society, designers of community-based interventions believe that with sufficient encouragement, education and skills, citizens can become more active in modifying and overcoming unhealthy social conditions. The goals of community health interventions, then, are to help set in place social structures that support and reinforce individual and group efforts at improving health and the quality of life.

The emphasis on facilitative social structures is not intended to minimize the efforts that individuals can take to improve their own health. Indeed, much can be accomplished by encouraging patients to change unhealthful practices which contribute to increased risk for disease. For example, convincing patients to adopt a healthy diet, decrease smoking, drug and alcohol intake and engage in moderate exercise have been prime ingredients in the reduction of cardiovascular risk that has taken place within the last two decades. However, there is a limit to what individuals can do on their own when confronted with adverse environmental conditions. The barriers to continued improvements in community health are not only in the individual citizen's knowledge of proper health practices, but also in economic factors and social customs that maintain risk-producing conditions.