BACKGROUND COMPASS (Comprehensive Assessment, Strategic Success) is the Florida Department of Health's community health assessment and health improvement planning initiative. Since 2002, COMPASS built state and county health department infrastructure to support a comprehensive, systematic, and integrated approach to community health assessment and planning. METHODS To assess the capacity of F...

Recent years have witnessed an increase in the use of community based participatory research (CBPR) tools for understanding environment and health issues and facilitating social action. This paper explores the application and utility of photovoice for understanding water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) behaviours and catalysing community led solutions to change behaviours. Between June and Augu...

The majority of Acholi recognize that most combatants in the Lord ' s Resistance Army (LRA) were fo rcibly abducted and have themselves been victims. This creates a moral empathy with the perpetrators and an acknowledgement that the formal justice system is not sufficiently nuanced to make the necessary distinctions between legal and moral gu ilt . This has generated a remarkable commitment to ...

This study was conducted in a rural community, São João dos Queiróz, a township in the county of Quixadá, Ceará, Brazil, using a combination of participatory research and community education in compliance with the health promotion reference and principles of the 1986 Ottawa Charter. The project was joined by representatives of several local government institutions and organizations from the gra...

There is an increasing array of information and communications technology (ICT) aimed at improving societal well-being. As Gurstein and Horan (2005) note, these community information systems (CIS) are designed and built for use by members of a community to support a host of different social, economic, and cultural goals, . This community can be based on a physical location, such as a system bui...

Taxonomies are a well-established instrument for organizing and accessing resources in Information, Content and Knowledge Management (ICKM) systems. Furthermore, they contribute to a common understanding and an improved communication in the user community by fostering the development and usage of a shared vocabulary. In addition to these operational usage scenarios, we argue in this paper that ...

Local health departments often use multidisciplinary top management teams (TMTs) to organize the work of the agency. The purpose of this study was to examine the use of TMTs in North Carolina local health departments and how TMTs use affected agency performance. TMT diversity and TMT performance positively affected the local health departments' (LHDs) performance. As well, the TMTs' agenda affe...

The potential capacity of children to confront the HIV/AIDS pandemic is rarely considered. Interventions to address the impact of the pandemic on children and adolescents commonly target only their vulnerabilities. We evaluated the Young Citizens Program, an adolescent-centered health promotion curriculum designed to increase self- and collective efficacy through public education and community ...

BACKGROUND Despite high immunization rates, hundreds of thousands of poor and underserved children continue to lack their necessary immunizations and are at risk of acquiring a vaccine-preventable disease. Local Health Departments (LHDs) and public health clinicians figure prominently in efforts to address this problem. METHODS This exploratory research compared ten (10) North Carolina LHDs w...