Question

In Community Health Planning, Can you provide me with several examples of population-level versus program level versus individual level health planning? Thank you

Answer 1

COMMUNITY HEALTHCARE PLANNING :Community health planning is a deliberate effort to involve the members of a geographically defined community in an open public process designed to improve the availability, accessibility, and quality of healthcare services in their community as a means toward improving its health status.

Effective planning in healthcare management can help to create clarity and improve communication. The strategic plan should address the key issues, the organization's vision and goals and the steps to get there. The employees and stakeholders will have improved confidence and faith in the organization.

Working at the community level to promote healthy living brings the greatest health benefits to the greatest number of people. It also helps to reduce health gaps caused by differences in income, education, race and ethnicity, location and other factors that can affect health

EXAMPLES OF POPULATION LEVEL VERSUS PROGRAM LEVEL VERSUS INDIVIDUAL LEVEL HEALTH PLANNING :

Population level health interventions are policies or programs that shift the distribution of health risk by addressing the underlying social, economic and environmental conditions.

Disease risk is currently conceived of as a continum rather than a dichotomy. There is no clear division between risk for disease and no risk for disease with regard to levels of blood pressure, cholesterol, alcohol consumption, tobacco consumption, physical activity, diet and weight, lead exposure and other risk factors. In fact, recommended cutoff points for management or treatment of many of these risk factors have changed dramatically and in a downward direction over time (e.g., guidelines for control of the hypertension and cholesterol), in acknowledgment of the increased risk associated with common moderately elevated levels of a given risk factor. This continuum of risk is also apparent for many social and environmental conditions as well (e.g., socioeconomic status, social isolation, work stress and environmental exposures). Any population model of prevention should be built on the recognition that there are degrees of risk rather than just two extremes of exposure.

Only a small percentage of any population is at the extremes of high or low risk. The majority of people fall in the middle of the distribution of risk.

population perspective is that an individual's risk of illness cannot be considered in isolation from the disease risk for the population to which he or she belongs.

Understanding and ultimately improving a population's health rest not only on understanding this population perspective but also on understanding the ecology of health and the interconnectedness of the biological, behavioral, physical and socioenvironmental domains. In some ways, conventional public health models (e.g- the agent host environment triad) have long emphasized an ecological understanding of disease prevention.

It is also important to note that developmental and historical conditions change over time at both a societal level (e.g-demographic changes) and an individual level (e.g-life course issues) and that disease itself evolves as agents change in virulence.

Individual level health care planning is very important. It must be included in community Healthcare planning.

Program planning in health care planning is a multi-step process that generally begins with the definition of the problem and development of an evaluation plan. Although specific steps may vary, they usually include a feedback loop, with findings from program evaluation being used for program improvement.