THE CALIFORNIA ENDOWMENT'S HEALTHY COMMUNITIES PROJECT

At the request of The California Endowment, Prevention Institute is researching strategies for developing consensus around healthy community goals and primary prevention.  Our goal is to identify key elements in the community that reflect the health of that community and that effectively communicate what is critical for good health.  When asked, “What makes a community healthy?” people’s most immediate response often has to do with making sure there is a good hospital or medical clinic. The Healthy Communities Project seeks to broaden the understanding of what leads to good health by developing the tools and resources that help policymakers and communities focus not only on access to and quality of medical care, but also on other elements that contribute to healthy communities.

We are interested in your feedback!  Contact Virginia Lee (virginia@preventioninstitute.org) with any questions, thoughts, and project input.

Frequently Asked Questions (Also availabe as PDF)

1. What are the goals of the Healthy Communities Project?
2. What is a healthy community?
3. Why measure the health of communities?
4. Don’t we already have measures of health?
5. What is The California Endowment?

What are the goals of the Healthy Communities Project?

At the request of The California Endowment, Prevention Institute is researching strategies for developing consensus around healthy community goals and primary prevention. Primary prevention emphasizes actions that can be taken before people get sick or injured to create a community that reduces the likelihood and severity of illness and injury. 

When asked, “What makes a community healthy?” people’s most immediate response often has to do with making sure there is a good hospital or medical clinic. This project seeks to broaden this understanding of what leads to good health by developing the tools and resources that help policymakers and communities focus not only on access to and quality of medical care, but also on other elements that contribute to healthy communities.

In the United States, early deaths have been attributed to a combination of shortfalls in medical care; social circumstances; environmental exposures; behavioral patterns; and genetic predispositions. By ensuring that the general public, the media, elected officials, and others better understand what keeps us healthy or leads to illness and injury, we can do more to ensure the health of all communities.

Our goal is to identify key elements in the community that reflect the health of that community and that effectively communicate what is critical for good health. To this end, we will engage in three major activities. 1) We will gather information about how to characterize community health, identify tools and methods that best do that; and identify key sectors that play a critical role in keeping a community healthy.  Our findings will be summarized in a report back to the field and to key stakeholders. 2) We will develop a framework for a community health report or report card that includes health access and other factors.  The framework will include recommendations on the types of data to include, characteristics of community health, and how to make use of report cards.  3) We will engage advocates, researchers, elected officials, sector representatives and other leaders in a symposium in April ’06 about how to build consensus around an approach to making communities healthier and to ensure that the recommendations build a strong action plan throughout California to promote healthy communities.

What is a healthy community?

The places we live, work, and play, and the nature of our social relationships can all affect our health. A healthy community includes access to health and mental health services; health providers and health systems that effectively serve California’s diverse communities; and social and physical environments that shape healthy behaviors and outcomes. These factors include access to quality, affordable health care; housing; transportation; safety; parks, and access to nutritious foods, among others.

Why measure the health of communities?

Good health is something we all value. Since our health is influenced by the communities we live in, understanding a community’s health deserves the same degree of attention that we place on issues such as the quality of schools, property values, and transportation. Being able to measure community health will bring a focus to improving health and provide us a sense of how to prioritize action, what policies might need to be in place, and how money might best be spent to improve health. It will also allow progress to be tracked over time. Measurement is a critical step in improving health and in helping to convey --to the media, the public, elected officials, and others-- the full range of factors that contribute to good health beyond quality healthcare and individual behavioral choices.

Don’t we already have measures of health?

Typically, measures of population health tend to focus on health status alone, that is, the prevalence of disease and injury within that population; others measure access to and usage of medical care. However, few health status reports consider the impact of social and physical environments or, importantly, account for the interplay of health care and other community health factors. Some health-related factors are accounted for in reports and/or report cards on sustainability, quality of life, the environment, and infrastructure, for example. However, we don’t have a tool that can convey the range of key factors that constitute a community’s health. We can draw from a lot of existing work in all of these areas to develop a tool that will help measure community health.

What is The California Endowment?

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