Resources for Community Health Improvement Planning

Evidence-Based Practice and Evaluation

• The Guide to Community Preventive Services is a free resource to help you choose programs and policies to improve health and prevent disease in your community. The guide is produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Marketing.
• Intervention MICA is the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services’ interactive, evidence-based public health intervention planning tool. It provides information, tools and resources for intervention design, implementation and evaluation.
• Evidence-Based Practice Centers Program of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s review relevant scientific literature on clinical, behavioral, and organization and financing topics to produce evidence reports and technology assessments. These reports are used for informing and developing coverage decisions, quality measures, educational materials and tools, guidelines and research agendas.
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Program Performance and Evaluation Office supports program evaluation in public health programs. Among their resources is the Framework for Program Evaluation in Public Health.
• W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Evaluation Handbook and Logic Model Guide provides a framework for thinking about evaluation and outlines a blueprint for designing and conducting evaluation.
  
  

Assessment

• Association for Community Health Improvement’s Community Health Assessment Toolkit offers a nine-step pathway for conducting a community health assessment and developing implementation strategies.
• Florida Protocol for Assessing Community Excellence in Environmental Health (PACE-EH) employs the National Association of County and City Health Officials’ methodology to guide communities in identifying and addressing environmental health priorities. Florida PACE-EH is a nationally recognized program, providing models of community practice in identifying and solving environmental health issues.
• National Association of County and City Health Officials' Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships (MAPP) is a community-driven strategic planning tool for improving community health. Facilitated by public health leaders, this framework helps communities apply strategic thinking to prioritize public health issues and identify resources to address them. MAPP is not an agency-focused assessment tool; rather, it is an interactive process that can improve the efficiency, effectiveness and ultimately the performance of local public health systems.
• National Public Health Performance Standards Program (NPHPSP) is a collaborative effort to enhance the nation’s public health systems. Seven national public health organizations have partnered to develop national performance standards for state and local public health systems. The local instrument of the NPHPSP is used to conduct the local public health systems assessment, one of four MAPP assessments.
• The Platform to Analyze, Record and Track Networks to Enhance Relationships (PARTNER) software program is designed to help community collaboratives measure and monitor their collaborative activity over time. PARTNER is a free, Excel-based program designed with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and housed at the University of Colorado in Denver.

Assessment Partners

• Florida’s Local Health Councils study the impact of various initiatives on the health care system, provide assistance to the public and private sectors, and create and disseminate materials designed to increase their communities’ understanding of heath and healthcare issues. There are 11 health districts covering all of Florida’s 67 counties.
• Florida Association of Healthy Start Coalitions and Florida’s 33 Healthy Start Coalitions are dedicated to improving the health of pregnant women and babies throughout Florida. The fundamental goals of the Healthy Start Program are to reduce infant mortality, reduce the number of low birth weight babies and improve health and developmental outcomes.
• Florida Area Health Education Center (AHEC) Network is an extensive, statewide system for health professional education and support founded upon 10 regional Area Health Education Centers. Each center is supported by an AHEC program at one of the state’s medical schools. This organizational structure enables each AHEC to draw upon resources of the academic health centers to address local health care issues.

Hospital and Local Health Department Collaboration for Community Health Assessment and Improvement Planning

Reference Materials

• Journal of Public Health Practice Management and Practice, July/August 2007, special issue focuses on accreditation of public health departments. Articles and reports focus on national accreditation, state-based programs, accreditation preparation and research initiatives. Also accessible through NACCHO toolbox (requires log-in).
• Institute of Medicine, The Future of Public Health, National Academy Press, 1988. "The Nation has lost sight of its public health goals and has allowed the system of public health to fall into 'disarray'," from The Future of Public Health. This startling book contains proposals for ensuring that public health service programs are efficient and effective enough to deal not only with the topics of today, but also with those of tomorrow. In addition, the authors make recommendations for core functions in public health assessment, policy development, and service assurances, and identify the level of government--federal, state and local--at which these functions would best be handled. 
• Institute of Medicine and Board on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, The Future of the Public’s Health in the 21st Century, National Academy Press, 2002, reaffirms the vision of Healthy People 2010 and outlines a systems approach to assuring the nation's health in practice, research and policy. This approach focuses on joining the unique resources and perspectives of diverse sectors and entities and challenges these groups to work in a concerted, strategic way to promote and protect the public's health.