NEIGHBORHOODS - Community preventive services guide
Public health programs are often conceived and planned at the federal or state level. But most programs are implemented at the community level, creating the need for accessible information about their effectiveness among the populations they are intended to serve.
In August 1996, CDC launched an independent, non-government task force to develop the Guide to Community Preventive Services - a tool designed to make public health practice a more efficient and accountable process. The target audience of the Community Guide includes public health professionals, health care system administrators, and government legislators - anyone involved in making decisions about which programs to implement in particular communities.
“The Task Force on Community Preventive Services is made up of 15 national leaders from business, managed care, academia, and state and local government,” says Stephanie Zaza, M.D., M.P.H., chief of the Community Guide program at CDC. “The task force combs through scientific evidence of effectiveness of population-level interventions, summarizes that evidence, and then makes recommendations to include in the Community Guide. It’s a very objective effort, and it has earned credibility through the integrity of its process and the usefulness of its results. Simply put, the Community Guide helps officials sort out what works before they spend money on it.”
Production of the Guide has been supported by federal funds and a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Robert Wood Johnson is providing support for the development of two chapters of the publication as well as for overall editorial oversight and adaptation of the Guide into an electronic format.
“We are very pleased to partner with the CDC Foundation and the Task Force on Community Preventive Services,” says C. Tracy Orleans, Ph.D., senior scientist at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “It’s not enough to have 20 studies done, for example, on improving population levels of physical activity or the relative cost-effectiveness of alternative community health interventions. Individual findings need to be collected, assembled, and rigorously reviewed to discover what will be best in public health policy-making. We believe the Community Guide helps to transform sound science into wise public policy.”
Thanks to the Robert Wood Johnson grant, the initial phase of the Community Guide will be completed by the target date, 2003, and the information will be accessible in both print and electronic formats.