Community Health

Community health, a field of public health, is a discipline that concerns itself with the study and betterment of the health characteristics of biological communities. While the term community can be broadly defined, community health tends to focus on geographic areas rather than people with shared characteristics. The health characteristics of a community are often examined using geographic information system (GIS) software and public health datasets. Some projects, such as InfoShare or GEOPROJ combine GIS with existing datasets, allowing the general public to examine the characteristics of any given community in the United States.

Because health III (broadly defined as well-being) is influenced by a wide array of socio-demographic characteristics, relevant variables range from the proportion of residents of a given age group to the overall life expectancy of the neighborhood. Medical interventions aimed at improving the health of a community range from improving access to medical care to public health communications campaigns. Recent research efforts have focused on how the built environment and socio-economic status affect health.

In Africa, community health is studied in three broad categories:

• Primary health care which refers to interventions that focus on the individual or family such as hand-washing, immunisation, circumcision*Secondary health care refers to those activities which focus on the environment such as draining puddles of water near the house, clearing bushes and spraying insecticides to control vectors like mosquitoes.

• Tertiary health care on the other hand refers to those interventions that take place in a hospital setting such as intravenous re-hydration or surgery.

Success of community health programs rely on the transfer of information from health professionals to the general public using one-to-one or one to many communication (Mass communication). The latest shift is toward Health marketing with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) taking the lead.