Summary of the Healthy Communities Critical Issue Session
Sacramento: Region IX
December 9, 1998
Moderator:
Matthew Guidry, PhD
Senior Advisor, Office of Public Health and Science, US DHHS
Panelists:
Joan M. Twiss
Director, Center for Civic Partnership
- We can help make communities a better place to live by providing educational programs
that inspire and inform, and technical assistance and resources for initiating and/or
maintaining Healthy City/Community programs.
Focus Areas:
- Communities must develop a vision and prioritize goals. Neighborhoods need to be
revitalized.
- Children and youth must be engaged and protected. We need to promote healthy lifestyles.
- Programs at community levels, such as garden plots, should be provided.
- Special populations should be supported.
Challenges:
- Community assets should be emphasized and deficits downplayed. Funding should be
decategorized.
- Local data is not always available.
- More training on community building should be provided
Karen Bodenhorn, RN, MPH
Executive Director, California Center for Health Improvement
- Californians want to live longer, healthier and more productive lives. They value
prevention and recognize its important role in maintaining healthy lifestyles.
- Health improvement starts at the community level. Many Californians are involved in
making their communities healthier places because they want to maintain their higher level
of health.
- Jobs, safe neighborhoods, affordable healthcare, and good schools are all a part of what
makes a healthy community. As such, a healthy community embraces all of those values by
involving a high degree of professional collaboration from many segments of the community.
- Healthy People objectives provide a realistic framework for healthy communities to
develop specific indicators to measure progress, identify priorities, and develop mission
statements. The objectives also serve as a strategic focus that healthy communities use to
link with national health promotion objectives.
- Creating effective partnerships at the community level by getting people involved is
importance for meeting the Healthy People 2010 objectives. To a large extent, this
involvement is encouraged by a nucleus of people who have an interest in making their
communities healthier places to live, work and raise their families.
- Integrate policy interventions into all objectives. This is critical for communities to
develop a vision of health that supports the Healthy People 2010 objectives.
- Communities are seeking new strategies for promoting health changes. Availability and
use of reliable data are an important aspect of this process.
Wynne Grossman
Healthcare Forum
- Each community should realize that their problems are the same and they should measure
them in the same way to compare them in the same way. We need to be able to standardize
data from communities.
- Outcomes (software) advances performance-based community improvement by performing the
following features:
- Allows for the development of a community-wide database on health, quality of life,
economic vitality and community capacity. Provides guidelines for determining outcomes.
- Supports multiple users and facilitates information sharing among users.
- Includes hyperlinks to important sources for information on the World Wide Web.
- Provides charting and graphing capabilities. Expands reach, speed, and proficiency.
- Designed with view windows and pull down menus. Integrates with existing applications.
- Fully customizable.
Deborah Silver
Health Promotion & Policy, Pasadena Public Health Department
- The Goals of the Pasadena Healthy Cities Project are to 1) identify and prioritize
quality of life issues, 2) define, measure and update quality of life indicators, 3) use
quality of life indicators for planning policy development, and resource allocation.
- The quality of life development process is completed in six phases that follow: 1)
define quality of life with community input, 2) develop indicators for priority issues, 3)
data collection, 4) organize information for presentation, 5) promote
visibility/marketing, 6) application.
- The ten topic areas for the quality of life index are as follows: 1) health, 2) alcohol,
tobacco and drugs, 3) economy and employment, 4) recreation and open space, 5)
environment, 6) transportation, 7) education, 8) housing, 9) community safety, and 10)
arts and culture.
- One third of the indicators correspond to Healthy People 2000 objectives. The targets
correspond to Healthy People 2000 targets. The CDC consensus set of health indicators are
incorporated. The Health People 2000 objective of monitoring community health status is
met.
- Data collection issues are as follows: 1) are they meaningful and measureable? 2)
comparability of data (e.g., geographic and demographic categories, time frames of data
collection), 3) labor intensive, 4) securing organizational cooperation.
- Uses of the quality of life index include: policy development, resource development,
priority setting/resource allocations, strategic planning, new project development.
Lessons learned:
- Successful projects are community driven. Indicator projects are labor intensive.
- Indicators should be reliable, available over time, easy to collect, measureable and
meaningful, relevant to local issues.
- Priority and target setting is a challenge.
- Track unavailable data, data sources, and formulas and calculations. Develop
relationships with data suppliers early on.
The three main points discussed/concluded of the session were: