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Advovacy

The document discusses the importance of community action and development, emphasizing the need for empowerment and social justice in health advocacy. It distinguishes between public health, which focuses on population-level interventions, and health advocacy, which targets individual and community activism. Key principles of community-centered approaches include participation, empowerment, and addressing social inequalities to improve health outcomes.

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4 views

Advovacy

The document discusses the importance of community action and development, emphasizing the need for empowerment and social justice in health advocacy. It distinguishes between public health, which focuses on population-level interventions, and health advocacy, which targets individual and community activism. Key principles of community-centered approaches include participation, empowerment, and addressing social inequalities to improve health outcomes.

Uploaded by

muquddaskhokhar03
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Strengthening community action

 LEARNING OUTCOMES:
 By the end of this lecture, you will be able to:
 Define community/communities
 Understand theories of empowerment and social action
 Understand the different processes of a community development approach
 Discuss the challenges presented by a community development approach.
Health Advocacy

 Public health and health advocacy are two distinct but related fields
that aim to improve the health and well-being of individuals,
communities, and populations.
 While both public health and health advocacy are concerned with
improving health outcomes, public health focuses on population-level
interventions and policies, while health advocacy focuses on
individual and community-level activism and advocacy for change.
Continue..

 Health advocacy and public health are both vital fields that play crucial roles in
promoting better health outcomes for individuals and communities. While there
is some overlap between the two fields, important differences reflect their
distinct focuses and scopes of work.

 Public health, on the other hand, refers to the science and practice of promoting
and protecting the health of populations. This includes efforts to prevent the
spread of disease, improve access to healthcare, promote healthy behaviors, and
address social determinants of health.

 Public health professionals work at the local, state, and national levels to design
and implement programs and policies that promote health and prevent disease.
Continue..

 Public health advocacy refers to gaining political commitment for particular health
goals or programs. It targets decision-makers, policymakers, and more generally, those
who can influence individuals’ actions in the community.

 For this purpose, there are several advocacy strategies aim to create and maintain
effective systemic changes to alter the way people behave in a community including
scientific researches.

 So far, public health advocacy has been used in several public health areas, including
global health corruption, health concern or crisis, health education, and tobacco
smoking emphasizing its role in translating research into policy, practice, and seeing
changes in public health.
Strengthening community action

 Community development has been defined as:

 Building active and sustainable communities based on social justice and mutual
respect.

 It is about changing power structures to remove the barriers that prevent people
from participating in the issues that affect their lives.

 Community workers support individuals, groups and organizations in this


process.
Continue..
 Community development is thus both a philosophy and a method. As a
philosophy its key features are:
A commitment to equality, and the challenging of attitudes and
practices which discriminate against and marginalize people
• An emphasis on participation and enabling all communities to be heard
 An emphasis on lay knowledge and the valuing of people’s own
experience
 Recognizing the skills, knowledge and expertise that people contribute
 The empowerment of individuals and communities through education,
skills development, sharing and joint action.
Community development and health promotion
 Community development is a recurring theme in health promotion, but its role as a
strategy reflects a changing political environment.

 In the 1960s the women’s movement emphasized the need for women to reclaim
knowledge about their bodies and control over their lives.

 Shared personal experience led to a new understanding of health issues as well as


providing positive effects and social cohesion for participants.

 Black and minority ethnic groups also addressed health issues, particularly the
effect of racism within the health services (Jones, 1991).
Continue..

 In the 1970s and early 1980s numerous community development


projects were set up, mostly funded and located outside the NHS.
 Inner-city decline prompted youth work, neighborhood centers and
planning groups which drew attention to the relationship between
poverty, health and inequalities in service provision (Rosenthal,
1983).
Continue..

 By the mid-1980s the UK Community Health Initiatives Resource Unit


(1987) estimated that there were 10,000 local projects in existence.
 By the 1990s the lead health promotion agencies for developing strategies
were under pressure, as community development was seen as too radical.
 Its focus on structural causes of inequality, such as class, race and gender,
was not acceptable to New Right political ideology.
Working with a community-centred approach

 The ways in which community-centred approaches are carried out vary


enormously.

 However, there are a number of core principles which overlap and link together:
• Participation

• Community empowerment

• Community led

• Social justice

• Asset based.
Community Empowerment

 Empowering communities is a core principle of community development and


identified as one of the ‘family’ of community-centred approaches. It has been
defined as:
 A process by which communities gain more control over the decisions and resources that
influence their lives, including the determinants of health. Community empowerment builds
from the individual to the group to the wider collective and embodies the intention to bring
about social and political change. Laverack (2007), p. 29.

 Community empowerment starts with a process of critical consciousness-raising


in which individuals and communities begin to question and challenge the social
justice of their situation
Community led
 The term community led requires us to make a commitment to learning from
communities, being accountable to communities and working in partnership.

 This is not without its tensions, for example, when needs and priorities identified by
communities are not compatible with those identified by statutory and funding bodies.

 An important aspect of community-centred approaches is legitimizing people’s


knowledge about health and well-being and giving them a voice.

 Not only does this pose a challenge to medical dominance, but it is also very different
from systematic research into needs (see Chapter 18). Establishing the needs of the
community also means a shift towards more participatory and locality-based
involvement.
Social Justice
 Inequalities exist within society, and some communities are more
privileged and better resourced – and consequently healthier – than
others.

 Community development sees these inequalities as having been created


by society and therefore amenable to change by society.

 Community development seeks to strengthen civil society in a


democratic and participatory way by giving a voice to communities that
are disadvantaged or oppressed (Craig et al., 2004).

 In so doing, it focuses on the determinants of health rather than on


individual lifestyles.
Continue..

 This may mean:

 working to promote the health of disadvantaged groups •

 increasing the accessibility of services

 influencing the commissioning of services

 acting as an advocate and representing the interests of disadvantaged


groups

 building a social profile of the community, highlighting the


relationship to health status

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