Community Health
Community health is the part of the NCNS program where you learn how to collaborate with the community to improve their health and well-being.
In this part of the program you work with groups, community coalitions or agencies to address the health needs of the community. Karen Halverson, the executive director of the Southeast Arizona Health Education Center (SEAHEC) is the liaison between the NCNS program and the community. A community group interested in having students work with them would contact Karen. An appropriate activity for student training is identified and a team formed that includes Karen, at least one community/agency representative, the students participating in the program and the faculty.
As a student participant, you focus on two areas:
- getting to know the community
- completing the activities required to develop the health intervention identified by the community agency or coalition.
To get to know the community, students are assigned different components of the community on which they report. For example, several students might report on the health and social services of the community. They identify what facilities are available in the community, which services residents have to travel to a larger town for, if there are restrictions on the services provided, and so on. They know if you have to be a resident of Santa Cruz County to obtain services at Mariposa Community Health Center, what type of services are available and where clients might receive services that are not available. Another student might report on the economics of the community. They describe the maquiladoras, the manufacturing plants located across the border in Nogales, Mexico, where products are assembled, shipped to warehouses in Nogales, Arizona, which then ship the products to other areas in the United States.
Students develop the intervention needed by the collaborating agency or community coalition. Because of the limited time that students spend in the community, most interventions tend to be educational. For example, students one summer developed a nutrition education intervention for the Summer Youth Institute, a program for teens in the community to learn how to be health promotoras (health educators) in their schools. Another intervention involved conducting a community forum on how the perpetrators of domestic violence are treated. As a result of this forum, the community developed additional programs for the treatment of perpetrators.
So how would you go about getting information about the community and developing an intervention? One of the primary methods you use is the key informant interview. That simply means identifying someone in the community who has expertise in the area of interest and interviewing them. So to find out about health services, you would almost certainly interview Gail Randolph from Mariposa Community Health Center. You might interview the mayor of the town of Nogales to find out how the maquila industry affects the town. You would also get information off the Web, especially statistical information, and from previous student reports. Finally all the information would be brought together in a report that goes to the collaborating agency, to SEAHEC, and to other interested stakeholders in the community.