Qualities of A Healthy Community Include

Soriano, Ana Isabel C.
MT0923 November 06, 2010
Qualities of a Healthy Community include:
 Clean and safe physical environment

 Peace, equity and social justice
 Adequate access to food, water, shelter, income, safety, work and recreation
for all
 Adequate access to health care services
 Opportunities for learning and skill development
 Strong, mutually supportive relationships and networks
 Workplaces that are supportive of individual and family well-being
 Wide participation of residents in decision-making
 Strong local cultural and spiritual heritage
 Diverse and vital economy
 Protection of the natural environment
 Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well being.
 Social, environmental and economic factors are important determinants of
human health and are inter-related.
 People cannot achieve their fullest potential unless they are able to take
control of those things, which determine their well being.
 All sectors of the community are inter-related and share their knowledge,
expertise and perspectives, working together to create a healthy community
 Wide community participation
 Broad involvement of all sectors of the community
 Local government commitment
 Creation of healthy public policies
Community health, a field public health, is a discipline that concerns itself with
the study and betterment of the health characteristics of biological communities.
While the term community can be broadly defined, community health tends to focus
on geographic areas rather than people with shared characteristics. The health
characteristics of a community are often examined using geographic information
system (GIS) software and public health datasets. Some projects, such as InfoShare
or GEOPROJ combine GIS with existing datasets, allowing the general public to
examine the characteristics of any given community in the United States.
Because health III (broadly defined as well-being) is influenced by a wide array of
socio-demographic characteristics, relevant variables range from the proportion of
residents of a given age group to the overall life expectancy of the neighborhood.
Medical interventions aimed at improving the health of a community range from
improving access to medical care to public health communications campaigns.
Recent research efforts have focused on how the built environment and socio-
economic status affect health.
Public health is "the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and
promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society,
organizations, public and private, communities and individuals." (1920, C.E.A.
Winslow)[1] It is concerned with threats to the overall health of a community based
on population health analysis. The population in question can be as small as a
handful of people or as large as all the inhabitants of several continents (for instance,
in the case of a pandemic). Public health is typically divided into epidemiology,
biostatistics and health services. Environmental, social, behavioral, and occupational
health are other important subfields.
There are 2 distinct characteristics of public health:

1. It deals with preventive rather than curative aspects of health
2. It deals with population-level, rather than individual-level health issues
The focus of public health intervention is to prevent rather than treat a disease
through surveillance of cases and the promotion of healthy behaviors. In addition to
these activities, in many cases treating a disease may be vital to preventing it in
others, such as during an outbreak of an infectious disease. Hand washing,
vaccination programs and distribution of condoms are examples of public health
measures.
The goal of public health is to improve lives through the prevention and treatment of
disease. The United Nations' World Health Organization defines health as "a state of
complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of
disease or infirmity.
Health, Extent of continuing physical, emotional, mental, and social ability to cope
with one's environment. Good health is harder to define than bad health (which can
be equated with presence of disease) because it must convey a more positive
concept than mere absence of disease, and there is a variable area between health
and disease. A person may be in good physical condition but have a cold or be
mentally ill. Someone may appear healthy but have a serious condition (e.g., cancer)
that is detectable only by physical examination or diagnostic tests or not even by
these.
Factors affecting community health are the following:

1. political issues
2. socio-economic problems
3. heredity
4. our environment
5. our behaviour
6. and our health care delivery system
The CommunityHealth History
Serafino Garella, M.D., a board-certified Internist and Nephrologist founded

CommunityHealth in 1993. Then the growing numbers of struck chairman of the
Department of Medicine at St. Joseph Hospital, Dr. Garella uninsured and curious
about the extent of the crisis. He and a group of colleagues went door-to-door in
several Chicago neighborhoods, asking people about their health care situation.
Nearly half of the people he surveyed had no insurance, nor access to reliable health
care.
Shocked by those results, and driven by the belief that all people have the
right to receive health care, Dr. Garella secured funding and a storefront location. He
next recruited several health care professionals to his cause, and with that,
CommunityHealth was born.
In the beginning, the clinic was open just a few hours per week. Since then, as the
demand for services ballooned and the number of volunteers grew,
CommunityHealth has relocated twice and greatly expanded its hours, services and
programs.
Today, thanks to a successful capital campaign, CommunityHealth owns the
building that houses its clinic at 2611 W. Chicago Ave., Chicago.
In 2005, CommunityHealth’s clinic was renamed the Lederman Family Health Center,
in recognition of a major gift from long-time friend and contributor Sam Lederman.

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Soriano, Ana Isabel C.

MT0923 November 06, 2010

Qualities of a Healthy Community include:

 Clean and safe physical environment

There are 2 distinct characteristics of public health:

Factors affecting community health are the following:

Serafino Garella, M.D., a board-certified Internist and Nephrologist founded

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