A Little about Community Population Health and Wellness
Communities across the U.S. and internationally are working to improve population health to increase human welfare and decrease health care costs. There is evidence that indicators of population health and wellness vary geographically due to the structural conditions of local communities. For example, communities differ in early life developmental and cancer prevention opportunities for children, such as physical activity, healthful eating, and obesity. Some communities have greater health and wellness promoting behavior rates and lower obesity rates, compared to other communities. An omnibus challenge to achieve population health and wellness improvement, therefore, is to facilitate change in conditions across in the numerous places where people live, learn, work, and play in a geographic area. This a multilevel whole-of-community population health and wellness dynamic system problem.
Communities across the U.S. and internationally are working to improve population health to increase human welfare and decrease health care costs. There is evidence that indicators of population health and wellness vary geographically due to the structural conditions of local communities. For example, communities differ in early life developmental and cancer prevention opportunities for children, such as physical activity, healthful eating, and obesity. Some communities have greater health and wellness promoting behavior rates and lower obesity rates, compared to other communities. An omnibus challenge to achieve population health and wellness improvement, therefore, is to facilitate change in conditions across in the numerous places where people live, learn, work, and play in a geographic area. This a multilevel whole-of-community population health and wellness dynamic system problem.
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Dr. David Dzewaltowski recently took the position of Endowed Community Chair for Activity, Nutrition and Obesity Prevention at the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Public Health and the Buffett Early Childhood Institute.
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The Community Population Health and Wellness for Children Research Project has the following aims:
While the project name is new, we have been collaborating with communities and organizations in integrated research and practice efforts promoting population health outcomes in children, youth and families targeting physical activity, nutrition and other health behaviors since 1998.
- Evaluate the impact of a whole-of-community development platform on community population health for children.
- Go here to see our emerging community wellness platform (www.wellscapes.org, www.healthyplaces.org).
- Go here to see our partnership on development of a school wellness platform (https://www.iowaswitch.org).
- Determine the innovation and implementation social system drivers of community population health for children.
- Develop and disseminate research and community observation tools to investigate community population health social systems organizational structure and reproduced social practices.
- Go here to see our Wel-Map observation tool and Wel-Map reports.
- Go here to see our Child Leadership Observation for Understanding Developmental Episodes and Engagement tool.
- Go here to demo our partner Greg Welk's Youth Activity Profile tool.
- Contribution to the development of generalizable principles to guide practices, programs, and policies through the development of a complex system ecosocial patch dynamics theory of population health and wellness that addresses inequity of opportunity.
While the project name is new, we have been collaborating with communities and organizations in integrated research and practice efforts promoting population health outcomes in children, youth and families targeting physical activity, nutrition and other health behaviors since 1998.
