PROJECT DEMONSTRATING EXCELLENCE: DEVELOPING INNOVATIONS IN OUTREACH TO PROVIDE COMMUNITY HEALTH SERVICES TO PEOPLE WHO ARE AT-RISK, POOR, AND/OR UNDEREMPLOYED
This Project Demonstrating Excellence will be a combination of a qualitative and quantitative study that will investigate the feasibility of developing an effective outreach service to identify health needs and provide needed health services to a population of at-risk, poor, and/or underemployed people residing in an urban area in the eastern United States through a community health services program. This learner's interest in this issue is long-standing, and predates this learner's academic pursuits which also have focused on the needs of urban populations with special needs.
The challenges faced by urban communities are so complex that innovative ways must be developed to address the problems. The health-related problems confronting at-risk, poor, and/or underemployed (indigent) people in urban communities do not exist in isolation (Cox, 2003; Granello & Hanna, 2003). Therefore, and effective community health services program will deal with the problems as a unified whole, as opposed to making an effort to deal with each problem type separately.
The practice of health promotion takes place within a culture. This culture is the pattern of individual attitudes and orientations among the members of the health-promotion program staff, the target population, and the larger society of which the target population is a part. Culture, thus, is the subjective realm that underlies and gives meaning to health-promotion actions. The components include cognitive orientations, affective orientations, and evaluative orientations, or, in other words, judgments and opinions about factors involved in the process of health-promotion (Mechanic, 1999).
While the United States has long been a nation of immigrants, the bulk of the newcomers during most of the nation's history were f...