Why Is This Important?
Healthy and Save Community Environments is one of the strategic directions in the National Prevention Strategy. The focus of this priority is to create, sustain and recognize communities that promote health and wellness through prevention. A healthy community environment can help make the healthy choice an easy choice. Aiding community organizations to improve their capacity to identify, implement and evaluate evidence-based strategies improves the likelihood of effective health promotion activities.
According to the Association of
State and Territorial Health Officials, Evidence-based public health has been defined as “the
development, implementation, and evaluation of effective programs and policies
in public health through application of principles of scientific reasoning”.
Nebraska state and local health departments partner and collaborate with their
communities in identifying priority health concerns and issues to address. Once
these priorities are identified, evidence-based strategies are utilized to
address them.
Story Behind the Curve
Nebraska SHIP Priorities 1 & 2: Nebraskans will have reduced heart disease, stroke and cancer mortality, morbidity and associated risk factors.
For this SHIP goal, several activities were planned for implementation:
- Assess the capacity of community organizations to implement evidence-based strategies.
- Identify pooled funding models to implement evidence-based strategies.
What We Do
In order to support these efforts, funding opportunities have been provided to local health departments to implement evidence-based strategies. Current Evidence-based strategies that have been implemented include: worksite wellness programming, community health worker strategies, and chronic disease self-management programs.
This scorecard is created to track performance, therefore the demonstration of data (numerical and narrative) describes what we define as success. In some instances, a trend may be moving in the wrong direction, but still may be within our 'Target for Success' area. The use of Color Arrows (and sometimes also Color Bands) help to define the Target for Success and Current Progress.
Green, Black and Red color arrows are used to reflect our 'Current Progress' status.
- GREEN Arrow = We're getting better!
- BLACK Arrow = We're maintaining our position.
- RED Arrow = We're going in the wrong direction.
Green, Yellow or Red color bands are used to reflect our 'Target for Success' zones.
- GREEN Color Band = We've reached our Target for Success!
- YELLOW Color Band = We're making progress, but not quite there yet.
- RED Color Band = We're below our Target for Success.
Data is described with the Time Period, Actual Value, Target Value, Current Trend and Baseline Change %. These mean:
- Time Period - The most current time period for which the data were available.
- Actual Value - The actual level of achievement, the most current data point for the indicator; also shown in a Color Band to reflect if that value is or is not within our Target for Success zone.
- Target Value - The desired level of achievement for the data indicator.
- Current Trend - The direction of progress is shown by a Color Arrow to reflect our Current Progress status, and also noting for how many data points the direction been occurring.
- Baseline Change % - The percentage of change between the baseline data point and the current data point (actual value); also shown with a Color Arrow to describe Current Progress status