Community Capacity Building for Health Promotion: Lessons from a Regional Australian Initiative

Abstract

This paper discusses a health promotion intervention that sets out to develop local capacity to address chronic disease risk factors in a remote Australian community. Community focus groups, and researcher and community discussions, aimed to determine the community's health concerns and build a partnership for community action. The journey from conception to reality was difficult for a number of reasons that are described here. Despite these difficulties, a range of outcomes included the establishment of an organisational structure that involved a local health promotion committee as the principal decision-maker, the establishment of a grants scheme to support locally determined initiatives and the formal incorporation of a community Health Promotion Committee (HPC) that ensured the sustainability of activities beyond the funded project period. The HPC is still coordinating health promotion activities. The promotion of community ownership of health promotion activities is a complicated process, given that time, resources, expertise and community involvement require a much longer-term commitment than that currently imposed by many funding bodies.

The application of the parallel track model in community health promotion: a literature review

“…However, all studies were included in this review because of the paucity of research on this topic. Six projects in this review were conducted or reported by Laverack (Laverack 2003, 2005, 2007, Laverack & Jones 2003, Laverack & Thangphet 2009) while the remaining four were conducted by other researchers (Fleming et al. 2007, Olney et al.…”

“…(2007) chose to conduct a project in Hispanic communities along the Texas‐Mexico border due to the fact that some communities in this area encountered the lowest levels of income, educational level and access to health services. Similarly, Fleming et al. (2007) developed a project to reduce the risks of chronic disease that was based in a remote community where the unemployment rate was increasing.…”

“…The other four projects in Estonia (Kasmel & Andersen 2011), Sweden (Lindgren et al. 2011), Canada (Laverack 2007) and Australia (Fleming et al. 2007) aimed to improve healthy behaviours and lifestyle such as physical activity in the targeted communities.…”

“…The projects in Thailand (Laverack & Thangphet 2009), Sweden (Lindgren et al. 2011), Australia (Fleming et al. 2007), and America (Laverack 2007) evaluated health‐related outcomes using different methods, largely depending on project designs.…”

“…2007), and America (Laverack 2007) evaluated health‐related outcomes using different methods, largely depending on project designs. For example, the project in Australia that aimed to reduce risk factors of chronic disease used a computer‐assisted telephone interview survey to examine the risk factors and awareness of community activities (Fleming et al. 2007), whereas the project in America that focused on health literacy used qualitative methods to explore the usefulness of the project and examine any improvement in health literacy (Olney et al.…”