Assessing Alternatives in a Health Promotion Project
Developing a community health promotion project requires research, design, and presentation of viable and prioritized intervention alternatives. When establishing such a program, it will be crucial to involve a group of stakeholders who make informed decisions to approve the health promotion plans as well as take the project to another level. It will be essential to hold a meeting that will help in fostering effective communication. The meeting will help to educate the team with a system thinking approach that includes definitions and identification of system elements. The team will also help in creating guidelines that facilitate collaborative norms, which aid in creating trust among the team members of the project. The meeting will provide a guideline on the criteria that is necessary to reach an agreement. Finally, the meeting will facilitate the creation of an agenda for the whole project.
There exists a variety of alternatives that health practitioners can undertake towards health promotion. However, a project team leader has to assess the available strategies that can help in integrating the knowledge and skills of the stakeholders to participate in a meeting.
Strategies to Integrate the Knowledge and Skills of Stakeholders
Stakeholders are individuals that have a direct interest in the process and outcome of the project. In the health care sectors, stakeholders include patients, the public, medical service providers, researchers, and public policymakers. Stakeholder engagement is crucial in a project. Their knowledge and skills play an important role in accomplishing a project. In order to integrate stakeholders’ skills, various strategies, the project leader and members of the project have to inform the relevant stakeholders of each and every part of the project. The project team leader should provide balanced and objective information to enable them to get a better understanding of the project problem, alternatives for solving the problem, and the viable solution for the project. Such an approach will offer stakeholders an opportunity to share their ideas concerning the project.
Consultation
Consultation is another strategy that will help in integrating the knowledge and skills of stakeholders. Project leaders need to make prior consultations with the relevant stakeholders and obtain their input on analyzing the project, assessing alternatives, and making decisions regarding the project. While consulting, project leaders need to listen to the ideas of the stakeholders and acknowledge their concerns and aspirations through providing feedback.
Involvement
The other strategy to help project leaders benefit from the skills of stakeholders is by directly involving them in the project. By directly working with stakeholders throughout the project, the project workers will work together to ensure that their concerns and aspirations are understood consistently and in line with project goals.
Collaboration
Collaborating with stakeholders is another strategy that can help the project leader to gain from the knowledge and skills of stakeholders to use them in the project. Partnering with stakeholders at each point of making decisions and establishing alternatives in identifying the necessary solutions.
Empowering Stakeholders in Decision Making
Project managers can also utilize the knowledge of stakeholders and their skills by giving them sufficient power to make decisions. When stakeholders have the opportunity to make decisions in a project, they will be forced to use their knowledge and skills to contribute to the entire project. Additionally, empowering stakeholders in the project will ensure that the project does not go out of hand and remains in line according to the projects.
Viable Alternatives
Management of Chronic Diseases.
While developing health promotions projects, there exists a number of viable alternatives to choose from. Health promoters can decide to manage chronic diseases. Such an alternative can be enhanced by providing space and appropriate equipment in a fitness center.
Health promoters can establish mobile clinics that help in carrying out screenings in the community (Ory et al., 2013). Project members can organize a together with stakeholders and create community events that are related to disease management such as marathons healthy eating practices and having early morning walks. The project members can also look for coaches who would work together with patients and guide them to manage themselves on issues of nutrition and counseling as well.
Providing Services to Aging Populations in the Community
Health promoters can also provide services to the gaining populations in a community as part of their project alternative. They can achieve this by enhancing and promoting services for the aged in the public transport sector (Kulik et al., 2014). The project members can provide mobile screening services so that aged people do not have to move from their homes. Other practices that health promoters can engage in to provide community services to the aged people can include the provision of meals and guiding them in different ways of benefiting from Medicare benefits. Coordinating care to the elderly and managing crises together with patient advocacy can form part of the health promotion activities.
Emphasizing of Health Wellness and Prevention
To emphasize wellness and disease prevention, the health promotion team can promote health awareness through the provision of physical therapy services, and offering education to communities in various ways of preventing medical conditions such as diabetes and other chronic diseases (Douglas & Fenton, 2013). Members of the project can also use various newsletters from hospitals to provide effective training and educative services to members of the community and different ways in which they can consume health insurance services offered by different health insurance companies. Additionally, they can partner with hospital staff in providing wellness and training programs to ensure that the community becomes safe health-wise.
Criteria for Selecting the Best Practices
With the presence of many options to choose from, a project team needs to develop an appropriate strategy and criteria that will enable the team to adopt the best practice. To select the best practice, the team has to assess the effectiveness of the selected strategy in achieving the required objectives (Punt, 2016). Effectiveness, in this case, refers to the ability of the selected practice to meet and deliver the expected outcomes in a timely manner with fewer resources.
Sustainability is another criterion that the team should use to select the best practice. The practice should incorporate standardized practices in providing health promotion activities to the public. The practice selected also needs to address the objective of the whole project and ensuring that health benefits have increased in the communities. It should also asses the community capacity to utilize the strategy adopted. By considering the availability of resources such as finances, it should also assess the impacts of the selected practice to the community.
The relevance of the selected practice will also act as an important criterion for selecting the practice to apply. The practice needs to be relevant in addressing important health issues in a community. The practice should asses the priority needs of a community and analyze the disease burden to provide necessary intervention.
Consensus-Building Structure for Arriving At Feasible Solution Interventions
In most projects, the purpose of consensus building is to help in settling conflicts that involve various parties. The approach is crucial in transforming interactions to help in meeting the interests of interested parties (Klein et al., 2013). Consensus building may vary from one stage to another. However, all models address the same set of fundamental issues. There are various steps involved in building a consensus. They include identifying the problem, identifying the participants, and identify their needs. The other step is through convening, which involves looking for funds, securing a location, and finding a mediator. Once this step has been completed, the next step is to design a process. It is the role of mediators or facilitators to design a process. In this step, the parties suggest a number of modifications that they need to make the project successful. Other steps of building a consensus structure include identifying and evaluating alternative solutions. The final steps include decision making, approval of the agreement, which creates trust and, finally, implementation, which creates strong agreements.
Summary and Analysis Based On Alternatives and Recommendation
The alternatives for the project include the management of chronic diseases, providing services to gaining populations in the community, and emphasizing health wellness and prevention. From the analysis, it is important to note that the number of chronic diseases in communities is on the rise. Therefore, it would be the most alternative to implement in a project. The alternative will provide the necessary support to people with a chronic condition and help in training members of the community different life skill practices to avoid getting chronic diseases. One of the best recommendations is to ensure that the health promoters’ partner with community health facilities to offer the necessary services for people with chronic conditions.
References
Douglas Jr, J. M., & Fenton, K. A. (2013). Understanding sexual health and its role in more effective prevention programs.
Klein, J. L., Fontan, J. M., & Harrisson, D. (2013). 28. The Quebec Model: a social innovation system founded on cooperation and consensus-building. The international handbook on social innovation: Collective action, social learning, and transdisciplinary research, 371.
Kulik, C. T., Ryan, S., Harper, S., & George, G. (2014). Aging populations and management.
Ory, M. G., Ahn, S., Jiang, L., Smith, M. L., Ritter, P. L., Whitelaw, N., & Lorig, K. (2013). Successes of a national study of the chronic disease self-management program: meeting the triple aim of health care reform. Medical care, 992-998.
Punt, A. E., Butterworth, D. S., de Moor, C. L., De Oliveira, J. A., & Haddon, M. (2016). Management strategy evaluation: best practices. Fish and Fisheries, 17(2), 303-334.