Engaging communities in health intervention research/practice

Abstract

Asking communities to participate in heath intervention is an increasingly popular strategy in public health and health promotion. The Community Health Educator Model, developed through a series of Participatory Action Research (PAR) projects in cancer screening in the UK during the 1990s, is a participatory health intervention model that emphasises community engagement. Although the model has been adopted by many health districts in the UK, little is known about the effectiveness of its appropriation; crucially, how researchers/practitioners engage with communities has seldom been reported. This paper presents the author's reflection on her experience in developing a set of community organising tools to respond to the diversity found in communities in practice. It suggests that engagement can be enhanced if the contingent and constructed nature of the concepts of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘community’ in the real world can be better understood. Researchers and practitioners need to cultivate a tolerance to difference and ambiguity so as to negotiate the ever-shifting boundary of engagement.

Keywords:

• engagement
• community
• ethnicity
• health intervention

Acknowledgements

The author thanks all minority women who volunteered as Community Health Educators in the three PAR projects, and is grateful for the support of the NHS Cancer screening programmes of the U.K. and their activities.

Notes

Notes

1. While there are currently five CHE projects in Leeds, the CHE model has also been adopted, in various forms and under different names, by Manchester, Ealing, Slough, Lanarkshire, Luton, Bradford, Leicester, and Sheffield.

2. Section 11 funding distributed State resources to distinct ‘ethnic minorities’ throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s under the Government's Urban Programme. This funding programme came to be seen as divisive and as potentially depoliticising black oppression. The programme was terminated in 1995 and replaced by the Single Regeneration Budget.