There are many community health promotion initiatives that have been tried and tested for many years. Those include disease prevention, maintaining the status of the local water source, ensuring that there are safe sidewalks, parks, and other recreational areas, as well as educating everyone about mental illness and the resources available to those who have it, as well as other disease prevention and control measures. Community health promotion includes so many things that it can be overwhelming, especially when trying to make heads or tails of what exactly needs to be done. Fortunately, there is always a basic plan for each of these components that makes it easier to do what needs to be done in order to achieve the most favorable result from the community health promotion initiatives that are implemented.
Goals Of health
One of the goals of this type of effort is to lower prescription costs by encouraging people to get their prescriptions filled at the primary care physician instead of filling them at the local pharmacy, or any other place where there is less than adequate competition. This is usually called “reduce the rate of utilization” or “reduce the rate of non-medical use.” There are a number of resources available to help people determine if this is an important part of their community health promotion initiative, including the Medicare Part D website, which allows them to compare quotes from different providers so they can see for themselves which is the lowest cost.
Another goal of this type of program is to lower prescription costs by promoting the development of partnerships with primary care physicians and other health care professionals. These relationships can develop into either a coupon program or a discount program based on the doctor-patient relationship. For example, a local diabetes resource center might be able to create a partnership with a primary care physician to provide discounted diabetes testing supplies. In turn, the primary care physician might be able to offer discounted or even free diabetes testing supplies to his or her patients if they also sign up for the diabetes maintenance plan. Such programs might be especially successful in areas that have high obesity rates and in which there is a low uptake of screening for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and other diseases.
The third major goal of this type of effort is to improve the quality of life for seniors by raising the quality of physical activity. There is an emerging trend of linking senior citizen health and nutrition efforts with those of children, particularly those of school age. For example, many schools have started programs that give kids a choice between healthy meals and recess, with the reasoning that healthy eating can help prevent obesity in later life and reduce the likelihood that they will develop health problems in a short time after starting a diet.
The fourth goal is to promote better wellness. This might not be considered a focus of typical community health promotion efforts, since it doesn’t really require such effort to be successful. However, one could argue that promoting better hygiene is a focus of preventive care, as is encouraging more people to get their diabetes under control. By encouraging physical activity and encouraging the participation of exercise among senior citizens, and involving them in disease prevention strategies through programs such as the Diabetes Education Program, a focus on physical activity can be promoted. The same approach could be used in efforts to reduce the number of people who are overweight or who have high blood pressure or cholesterol.
Some communities are beginning to see the value of focusing on these four health promotion goals as part of their usual routine. Those communities are finding out that when they make these four health promotion goals a central focus, they see a drop in health service utilization. They are also finding that the reduction in utilization of their health services leads to a reduction in overall hospital admissions and in emergency room visits. And those who are able to afford insurance coverage seem to respond better to these changes in the usual course of events. In fact, studies of other locales that have made health promotion activities a major priority show that health improvement tends to accelerate as a result of community involvement.
