Efforts of health professionals are shifting away from programs that "deliver health" toward those that build the capacity of communities to work together to create healthy places. The Healthy Communities Initiative (HCI) is a community development model in central Alberta (Canada) that involves the creation of a widely shared vision of…

This report discusses the preliminary results of a study that investigated arrest rates for adolescents who received community mental health services under Medicaid managed care programs in Hillsborough, Florida, and four surrounding countries. Results indicate many young recipients of mental health services were arrested in Hillsborough and…

For organizations providing support to mental health consumers, "cultural competency," or the ability to reach out effectively and appropriately to individuals of different cultural backgrounds, is central to meeting the needs of a diverse community. The Cultural Competency Initiative, which was launched in the year 2000, assisted…

This manual is a how-to-do-it guide to building coalitions of health and human service agencies, organizations, businesses, churches, and other community-based groups for collaborative research, planning, and action to improve resident health and quality of life. Most of the information provided was discovered and developed during the 4-year life…

Over a five-year period 230 senior-level University of New Mexico students in medicine, nursing, and pharmacy served in clinics in rural communities as part of Project Porvenir. Students, supervised by community-based preceptors, participated in the development of clinics and in the organization of services that otherwise were unavailable.…

The University of New Mexico Health Science Center offers an elective, weekly clinical experience for preclinical medical students, senior nursing students, and senior pharmacy students at a prison facility in need of medical services. Student reaction has been strongly positive and inmates have rated the student service highly. (Author/JMD)

As a way to teach database searching skills, students in a nursing research class were paired with, and performed literature searches for, faculty members or community health care professionals. Because students did not formulate questions or initial search terms, they concentrated on the search process, learning how professionals find and use…

Describes a rural West Virginia health-care center as a successful model program for integration between the clinic and community. Describes center facilities, funding sources, community cooperation, and cooperative residency program with regional medical school. Discusses implications for other medical-education programs. Describes differences…

Social ecological theory, social-work community organization models, and health-promotion models are brought together to address ways to generate change at the individual and policy levels, and to provide guidance for community health-promotion programs. An eight-year cancer-prevention project is presented as a case study. (EMK)

General practitioners (GPs) from the Australian state of Victoria and support people were surveyed about their concerns and priorities for meeting the health care needs of people with developmental disabilities. Despite the poor response rate (22% and 27%), sampling adequacy was obtained, and the tools were found to have construct validity.…

This instructor's resource guide, one in a series of products from a project to develop an associate degree program for paraprofessional rural family health promoters, deals with teaching a course in health care organization and issues. Covered in the first section of the guide are the role of health care organization and health issues in rural…

Following the collapse of health care services in many rural areas in recent years, rural health care providers are developing new strategies to meet the needs of their communities and are working creatively to maximize resources. Much of that effort has been enhanced with financial and technical assistance from federal, state, and private…

In 1995, Southwestern College, in California, participated in a project to develop a home health course for registered nurses and students interested in working in home health settings. The course was intended to provide nurses and students with the knowledge and clinical skills required for home health care, improve collaboration among community…

This collection gathers together several papers reflecting the state of the art in the development of community-based programs in health sciences education. Titles and authors are as follows: "Issues in Implementing a Problem-Based Learning Curriculum at the University of Sherbrooke" (Jacques E. Des Marchais; Bertrand Dumais);…

This paper offers some historical perspective on alternative research traditions and discusses some of the basic principles of community-based research as a tool for partnership development. The authors then describe an example of how Calvin College, a Christian comprehensive liberal arts college has used a multi-disciplinary approach in…