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Health Program Planning

last authored: Feb 2010, Rebecca Green-LaPierre
last reviewed:

 

 

In health promotion efforts, there has been a shift from “the individual” to “the community”, where programs and interventions have a larger reach. The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion lists eight Prerequisites for Health:

These fundamental conditions and resources for health cannot be solely left to the responsibility of the individual, nor can any one individual exert control over all these areas. Thus the new public health movement recognizes that political, economic, social, cultural, environmental, behavioural and biological factors can all favour health or be harmful to it. Therefore, health promotion goes beyond health care. It puts health on the agenda of policy makers in all sectors and at all levels, directing them to be aware of the health consequences of their decisions and to accept their responsibilities for health.

 

Health care providers must accept the exciting challenge to develop health promotion efforts that meet the needs of the communities they are working in. How better to know what these needs are then to have members of your community (your ‘target population’) directly involved in the planning of health promotion/education programs and events!

 

Once community needs are assessed, perhaps community dietitians will find themselves advocating for anti-poverty legislation, perhaps a public health nurse will realize a health literacy program is of great need. Interdisciplinary approaches to program planning and delivery are essential as the Ottawa Charter challenges us to “reorient health services and resources towards the promotion of health; and to share power with other sectors, other disciplines and, most importantly, with people themselves”.

 

This section will provide guidance on planning health programs. A program could be anything from a single event (e.g. a workplace wellness fair) to a five year research project examining the change in cost of nutritious food and the adequacy social assistance rates to purchase this food.

 

There are essentially five main stages to program planning: 1. Community Analysis & Diagnosis 2. Targeted Assessment 3. Program Plan Development 4. Implementation 5. Evaluation

 

  • stage 1
  • stage 2
  • stages 3-5

STAGE 1. Community Analysis and Diagnosis

 

Simply put, the community analysis is an investigation of the resources and needs of a community. The information collected for a thorough analysis can be placed in four categories:

  • Community backdrop e.g. geography, business and commerce, demographics, social and political structure
  • Community’s health status e.g. vital statistics, chronic disease rates
  • Community’s health care system e.g. human health resources, organization of service delivery
  • Community’s social assistance system e.g. provincial, federal and local programs

 

As you are collecting the information for the community analysis, consider both existing and new data sources. Relevant existing sources of data could include newspapers, census data, policy documents, medical charts, etc. Generating new data could involve conducting surveys, holding focus groups or community forums, interviewing community members and current health care providers, etc. Be creative! Drive around the community: where are the grocery stores, libraries, food banks? Talk to school teachers: are there existing school breakfast programs, what are the youth doing after school hours? Talk to health administration: what interventions have the longest wait times, how many people don’t have a family doctor?

 

Diagnosing your community will involve:

  • interpreting the state of health of the community
  • interpreting the pattern of health service delivery in the community
  • interpreting relationships between health status and health care services
  • summarizing evidence and establishing determinants of major problems
  • identifying the target population for the health education program.

STAGE 2. Targeted Assessment

 

The target population refers to a portion of a community that is identified as a focus for a health education program.

 

Health promoters/educators should always verify conclusions of Community Analysis with members of target population. Ideally, data from target population (the “consumers” of the health program) needs to be balanced with input from health care providers because successful programs have mutual goals between consumers, providers and planners. This targeted assessment:

  • Removes guesswork on behalf of the health professional
  • Provides baseline information (pre-intervention data)
  • Helps determine how best to use resources and successfully deliver a program
  • Helps match health services with community needs
  • Encourages community participation
  • Raises awareness, understanding and acceptance of the community’s health problems
  • Enables contextual planning
  • Determines health program focus (e.g. individual, community, organizational or public policy level)

Stages 3-5

Whether you are developing a new program or revising an existing one, never work alone! Invite a dietitian, social worker, Boys and Girls Club coordinator, fitness club owner, community garden coordinator, and one or two members of your target population to work together to create the best program that will take advantage of your community’s existing resources and truly meet the health needs of the target population.

 

A phenomenal resource to work through evidence-based program planning is the Online Health Program Planner, a collaborative effort by The Health Communication Unit at the University of Toronto and the National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools (one of six centres that make up Canada’s National Collaborating Centres for Public Health).

 

The Online Health Program Planner will help you:

  • Identify Stakeholders
  • Develop Program Goals
  • Develop Program Objectives
  • Identify Resources & Constraints
  • Select Delivery Methods & Activities
  • Plan for Evaluation
  • Plan for Implementation

This online resource can generate measurable objectives, logic models, budgets and more!