Community Engagement For Public Health Professionals

Article written by Shelley Argabrite, Chief Health Strategist at the Garrett County Health Department

What are you most passionate about for your community? Should we be surprised when programs have little to no impact on health outcomes when we fail to consider the community’s deep rooted concerns?  Asking residents a few questions about their well-being on a long questionnaire every few years for our community needs assessment does not get to the heart of building community buy-in to improve health.

Our intention when we opened our processes digitally was to start a conversation.  It was important to us that people knew there was a place where they could truly be heard.  Their ideas, questions, concerns, passions and general perspectives though they may differ from others had a place in the larger collective called Garrett County.

We wanted to foster a sense of belonging for everyone regardless of their status, place of employment, or any other qualifier by inviting all people to our table to have a conversation around topics that impact their daily lives and together, get closer to the solutions we need to improve our health by improving our lives.

-Shelley Argabrite

Let’s consider a few questions as we proceed with an equity lens and explore community engagement:

• Why are we engaging with the community in the first place?
• What do we hope to accomplish by engaging with the community?

If you are in the field of public health improvement and are interested in making a difference, you know it is impossible to succeed without collaboration.

Writing a plan with little or no input from the community may check the box, but how much impact does it actually have?

-Shelley Argabrite

Why are we engaging with the community in the first place?

Our answer is that it gives our work meaning.  Writing a plan that lacks collective vision from the community is one that will certainly sit on the shelf and will not inform the work we do to improve health by ultimately seeing better outcomes. We engage with our community because we exist to serve them.

The strength of a public health system rests on its capacity to effectively deliver the 10 Essential Public Health Services: Monitor health status to identify community health problems. Diagnose and investigate health problems and health hazards in the community. Inform, educate and empower people about the health issues. Mobilize community partnerships to identify and solve health problems. Develop policies and plansthat support individual and community health efforts. Enforce laws and regulations that protect health and ensure safety. Link people to needed personal health services and assure the provision of health care when otherwise unavailable. Assure a competent public health and personal health care workforce. Evaluateeffectiveness, accessibility and quality of personal and population-based health services. Research for new insights and innovative solutions to health problems.¹

I invite you to pause and answer this question for yourself. Where do you fit and why are you engaging with the community? Public health is changing ² and in an effort to exceed the current standards set for us, I encourage you to lead your community on this equity quest through unprecedented engagement.

What do we hope to accomplish by engaging with the community?

In Garrett County, we want to build trust by cultivating relationships through conversations. A community forum in the digital sense could be considered a dated concept, but what emerges through this technology is essential, it is communication.  We utilized the forum concept and applied it so we could “engage” in two way communication.  In the literature the concept is referred to as dialogic communication³ and that type of communication is ancient compared to our archaic, dated technological forum.  We know that to attain this ancient and at times mystical art called communication, we need several elements. For the purpose of this excerpt, we simply began.  We created a place and invited people to join us.  In that place there are real people from all sorts of backgrounds communicating in a transparent way.  Together, community members and agency stakeholders alike ask questions and find answers collaboratively.  We have a shared vision, it’s to make Garrett County the best place to live, work and play!  In order to achieve that every member in our community needs to be a part of the conversations that create the plan to incrementally make that happen.

There is a growing body of evidence that supports the notion that a sense of belonging is recognized as an important determinant of psychological and physical well-being. ⁴

Being invited is the very first step.

-Shelley Argabrite

Sources

1. https://www.cdc.gov/stltpublichealth/publichealthservices/essentialhealthservices.html
2. https://phnci.org/fphs
3. Augustine Pang, Wonsun Shin, Zijian Lew & Joseph B. Walther(2016) Building relationships through dialogic communication: organizations, stakeholders, and computer-mediated communication, Journal of Marketing Communications, 24:1, 68-82, DOI: 1080/13527266.2016.1269019
4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4546026/

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Article written by Shelley Argabrite, Chief Health Strategist at the Garrett County Health Department