Comprehensive Services
Strategies should include multiple components and affect multiple settings to address a wide range of risk and protective factors of the target problem.
2. Varied Teaching Methods
Strategies should include multiple teaching methods, including some type of active, skills based component.
3. Sufficient Dosage
Participants need to be exposed to enough of the activity for it to have an effect.
4. Theory Driven
Preventive strategies should have scientific or logical rationale.
5. Positive Relationships
Programs should foster strong, stable, positive relationships.
6. Appropriately Timed
Program activities should happen at a time (developmentally) that can have maximum impact in a participant’s life.
7. Socio-culturally Relevant
Programs should be tailored to fit within cultural beliefs and practices of specific groups, as well as local community norms.
8. Outcome Evaluation
A systematic outcome evaluation is necessary to determine whether program or strategy worked.
9. Well-Trained Staff
Programs need to be implemented by staff members who are sensitive, competent, and have received sufficient training, support, and supervision. Follow up (booster) training and technical assistance to staff are critical.
A public health intervention is thus any effort or policy that attempts to improve mental and physical health on a population level. Public health interventions may be run by a variety of organizations, including governmental health departments and non–governmental organizations (NGOs). Common types of interventions include screening programs, vaccination, food and water supplementation, and health promotion. Common issues that are the subject of public health interventions include obesity, drug, tobacco, and alcohol use, and the spread of infectious disease, e.g. HIV.
Evidence-based public health interventions have saved millions of lives since 1854, when Dr. John Snow first identified a public water well as the source of a major cholera outbreak in London. In the decades since, public health interventions have been instrumental in improving the health and well-being of people in large and small communities.1
A public health intervention is an organized effort to promote those specific behaviors and habits that can improve physical, mental and emotional health.
These interventions can also reframe the perspective of unhealthy habits to change the way people think about those behaviors.
Public health interventions play an important role in the overall health, longevity and productivity of a community, as they can improve quality of life, reduce human suffering, help children thrive, and save money. The people and programs involved in public health work to create the healthiest nation possible.
A policy may meet the criteria of a public health intervention if it prevents disease on both the individual and community level and has a positive impact on public health.
Public health interventions have been saving lives and reducing disability for decades, but these great achievements tend to go unnoticed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lists the ten greatest public health achievements from 1900 to 1999 as:
- Vaccination
- Motor vehicle safety
- Safer workplaces
- Control of infectious diseases
- Decline in deaths from coronary heart disease and stroke
- Safer and healthier foods
- Healthier mothers and babies
- Family planning
- Fluoridation of drinking water
- Recognition of tobacco use as a health hazard
But how have these public health interventions helped save lives? Well, it was a public health intervention that pushed for the passage of seat belt laws, and the 90 percent adherence to those laws saves nearly 15,000 lives each year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Vaccinations wiped out smallpox, diphtheria and paralytic polio and have nearly wiped out measles, rubella, mumps and other infectious diseases. Achievements in public health have also greatly improved safety in the workplace.
One of the most important public health achievements has been a dramatic reduction in deaths from cardiovascular disease (CVD). According to CDC statistics, the age-adjusted death rates from CVD have declined 60 percent since 1950.