Improving Health Standards, Coursework Example

Describe what you found to be the strengths of the standards for your selected essential standards. Identify one way in which you would expect an improvement in public health practice as a result of applying these standards?

The Public health system has developed over the years and their progress is based on providing the ideal education that will prevent or limit the number of patients in the medical facilities. It is on that basis that they have an improved level of standards. The standard that I have found to be quite impressive is the initiative to support community health efforts. This implies that the public health system is intent in improving the general health factors that are available in the communities, which will result in the communities being self reliant, and therefore the community can become independent in terms of monitoring or dealing with health problems in the community. It is based on the improvement on the health standards in the community. According to McKenzie’s (et al, 2009) study, community education and the ample deliberation of such social service definitely pulls down the rate of health issues from rising further (4).

The public health system partnering with communities will allow the delegation of health responsibilities to the communities, which will allow the communities to become more aware of the health problems and take the initiative in dealing with the health problems themselves.  This will also increase the health awareness of the community and develop a higher level of health awareness.The benefit of the improvement of the standard in the community is based on the delegation of the health responsibilities. In this case even though the health system will be in support of the initiative, the general responsibilities and development of the health facilities will be based on the community and not primarily on the public health system. This will reduce the work load on the public health system and ensure all for the system to deal with other matters.

Are there any barriers or difficulties you would anticipate in trying to apply those standards to your local health department? Is there anything missing that you would add to these standards?

The major hiccup or difficulty that may arise from the initiative would be to get the entire community behind the initiative of establishing heath facilities in the community. There may be resentment due to a large number of community members being reliant on their accustomed health procedures. To counter the difficulty, it will be essential to highlight as well as illustrate the general advantages of having the community developing health facilities as well as increasing health awareness, such as the initiative will be cheaper in the long run as the increase in health awareness will reduce the probability of falling ill; and in the case of falling ill there will be a facility in the community that will be available for quick treatment.  The ideology will serve to improve the community in general and reduce the over reliance on the public health system.

Kann (et al, 2001) however intends to impose that with the education shared from schools and networking that effect towards the communities intend to make the best out of the efforts of public health representatives in establishing a healthcare awareness culture (266). Believably, it is through this process that more would be able to know about their healthcare needs and make essential changes that they may need to deal with in consideration with their lifestyle.

References

CDC (n.d.) National Public Health Performance Standards Program (NPHPSP), retrieved from: http://www.cdc.gov/nphpsp/index.html. (Retrieved on October 14, 2011).

CDC (n.d.) Local Public Health System Performance Assessment Instrument pg 1-68, retrieved from:http://www.cdc.gov/od/ocphp/nphpsp/documents/local/Local.BookletA.pdf. (Retrieved on October 14, 2011).

McKenzie, J., Neiger, B., Thackeray, R. (2009). Health Education and Health Promotion. Planning, Implementing, & Evaluating Health Promotion Programs. (pp. 3-4). 5th edition. San Francisco, CA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Kann, L., Brener, N.D., Allensworth, D.D. (2001). Health education: Results from the School Health Policies and Programs Study 2000. Journal of School Health, 71(7), 266-278.