In this essay, I am going to be discussing the importance of one of the key approaches included in Beattie’s Model of Health Promotion, and how they have an impact on public health. The key approach I will be focusing on is Community Development.
Beattie’s Model of Health Promotion consists of four approaches. They are, health persuasion, legislative action, personal counselling and community development. I decided to indicate my focus on community development. This is because I believe that this approach can really make a positive impact on public health and society. I think this is a key approach because it not only focuses on assisting one individual, but several individuals. Community development is a technique in which community members come together to take joint action and come up with solutions to mutual issues. Community development strives to achieve, empower or improve the skills of several individuals or a local community. It is the concept to liberate or emancipate groups and or communities, so they acknowledge what they have in common and how social factors can affect their lives (Infed, 2013). There are numerous of different reasons why community development is needed in society. Opportunities are rising for communities to take on roles in service design and delivery, planning and budgets for their local neighbourhoods. Community development can concentrate on issues of authority and inequality, and it can help to make sure community voices are being heard. It can also form communities that are more resistant to stress.
This approach to health improvement, closely reflects my own views and values because I believe that to have any developments in the world, communities should come together and unite to make a difference and a positive change. The reason I feel so strongly about this is because of my religious views. Even though, there has been a lot of improvements in the world towards discrimination, there are still majority of individuals in the world that still discriminate and make negative assumptions about certain religions. I am aware that this is not related to health but I believe taking the community development approach would really improve the likelihood of any problem.
The community development approach to health improvement is a very substantial aspect of the health improvement policy and practice. This is both in the UK and internationally. This approach gives a positive understanding of the essential role of development support that obtains to empower societies and they would have the opportunity to make a positive impact on their own health (Health Communities, 2008). For community development to become a success, there is a theory called the five elements model. The five key elements are grassroots community work, community infrastructure, professional infrastructure, organisation development and overview and coordination.
The grassroots community work element incorporates outreach and development work precisely with a local community to empower individuals to come together and unite to coordinate around significant topics. The outcome of this could be individuals having an access to additional support or resources, creating new groups, activities or services, persistent involvement in decision making opportunities and immediately positively impacting urgencies and policies. The community infrastructure element is involved with empowering community groups, third sector organisations, thus increasing social capital and providing communities with an eager and more unified voice. Advocating community infrastructure encompasses influence on particularly, the focus of young people and them mostly connecting with older people. The connections can be verbal or even virtual, such as newsletters, articles, emails or combined working on generic schemes. Successful community infrastructures can associate at locality aim and or across a region or a city. The idea behind it is that they consent for the input of data, knowledge and perspectives, as well as joint action (Smithies, 2010).
The professional infrastructure element is the idea that within any community, there are expected to be an extensive variety of professionals with roles differing between development, engagement and service distribution. This element distinguishes that, professional networking is vital to extend the workforce skill-base that can be utilised into a specific enterprise or community. The delivery of cross cutting strategies, and the response or criticism into a series of significant local agencies of superior organisations, are also essential aspects of this element (Smithies, 2010).
The organisation development element aspires to expand the efficiency of organisations by delivering the skills and methods to vigorously succeed. All the five elements included in the model of course involve change management. Conversely, this element, more than any of the other ones, is related more with a greater scale change management in organisations and partnerships. Including connected knowledge and information back into policy changes, workforce expansion and authorising decision making (Smithies, 2010).
The overview and coordination element is an overview of the previous four elements, they are mutually connected in an efficient, tactical approach to community engagement. Each element may include different groups of individuals leading or organising, frequently based in different parts of an organisation, in different sectors, that could be community based. Therefore, it is vital if community engagement is to be methodical and strategic, rather than only impacting on small scale adjustment. This means that all elements are connected and coordinated. This element frequently recognises what organisation development must transpire, coordinate and or respond to community engagement work (Smithies, 2010). The five elements model is very vital as it aims to distribute work across various sectors, but also a local community or group. This model focuses on arrangement of programs and activities in a tactical, long-term process rather than a simple short-term way.
Within the community development approach, health is conceptualised based on the social model of health. This model efforts to tackle the wider impacts on health, including cultural, environmental, economic and social factors rather than just the disease and examination. It is a community led approach to prevent illnesses and diseases, the idea of the model is to prevent the disease before it occurs, before getting to the stage of where the disease must be treated. The model aims to focus on education, health promotion and policies. The social model of health goes beyond the effort of lifestyles and actions, it acknowledges the requirements for social change to deliver essentials for health. There are five significant principles within this model. The first principle is that it addresses the broader determinants health. For example, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic state, physical environment and location. The second one is to reduce social inequalities, this is done by promoting equity for all individuals. This is achieved by addressing the social determinants. The third one is to empower individuals and communities. This means having the capability to make positive choices about their health and contribute in healthy activities. The fourth key principle is access to healthcare. This is a substantial factor contributing to health status. The last principle is inter-sectorial collaboration. This is to involve all organisations and investors who have an effect over the social and environmental determinants of health. The five key principles to the social model of health are abbreviated to A.R.E.A.S. (Models of Health, 2012)
There are many advantages of the social model. These include, providing education for individuals so they don’t get the disease, it also costs less to prevent the disease rather than treating and encourages the community to take accountability and lead healthier lifestyles. Unfortunately, there are always limitations to all theories. For the social model, these consist of individual not believing that the disease will happen to them, also unfortunately not all diseases can be prevented and changing an individual’s lifestyle is very difficult. (Models of Health, 2012)
Community development has been used in public health practice on numerous occasions. For example, there is the ‘Be a Man’ program. This program is to encourage males to talk to their doctors about prostate cancer and improving their health. There is also the ‘Go For Your Life Strategy’. This involves various government and non-government stakeholders. They aim to approach a whole community and encourage the individuals to have healthy diets and exercise regularly. The concept of community development started after the second world war by colonial administrators. It is said that the administrators came up with the term ‘community development’ out of their efforts to advance ‘basic education’ and social welfare in the UK colonies. For example, in 1944, Mass education in the colonies, identified an importance on literacy training and supported the promotion of agriculture, health and other social services (Infed, 2013). This was one of the first community developments actions that occurred.
Community development has progressed over time for various reasons. One being government policy. In November 2011, the Localism Act was appointed to all individuals in the UK. This act included new choices and freedoms for the government, new rights and authorities for individuals and groups in a community, restructure to make the planning system more independent and more efficient and restructure to certify that verdicts about housing are taken locally. The Localism Act includes a chain of actions with the aptitude to accomplish a significant and lasting change in power away from the government and more towards local people. This is when community development in public health practice became more of a success. This is because it gave communities an opportunity to make a change. For example, Stoptober. This is a campaign set out to encourage communties from smoking and improving their health and lifestyle in October. Also, the change4life campaign, this is to improve individuals’ health and wellbeing. The campaign provides people with a variety of healthy eating tips so that they have the knowledge and capability to lead a healthy lifestyle, it is aimed to encourage parents to lead their children to have a healthy lifestyle, as well as themselves. Additionally, there is the five a day campaign. The five a day campaign looks to persuade local communities to relish a range of several fruits or vegetables as part of a healthy balanced diet. Fruits and vegetables are very beneficial towards your health. For example, they supply you with dietary fibre, which supports to preserve a healthy digestive system and lower risk of bowel cancer. They can also lower chances of stroke, heart disease and even some cancers. The campaign became a huge success when the UK government formally supported it. This was because they wanted to strengthen the significance of natural, healthy foods. This campaign guided that eating at least five portions of fruit and vegetable would help to prevent against generic health problems like obesity and heart disease.
There are many health organisations that exist in public health which use the approach of community development. For example, the Community Development Foundation which is funded by the Department of Communities and Local Government, the Community Development Exchange sponsored by the Cabinet Office, and the Federation for Community Development Learning . In addition, there is also an organisation called PACES and they are developing ideas in this area.
In conclusion, the community development approach to Beattie’s Model of Health Promotion has made a huge impact on public health and it is a more creative way to prevent diseases and improve individuals’ health and lifestyle. Even though, community development is not always a success as some communities do not like to participate in campaigns or activities, it has still proven that the approach can really make a huge difference in communities.