New tools for community involvement in health

This paper explores the question: can the new information technologies (IT) significantly improve community involvement in health, and if so, under what organizational conditions and policies? it outlines first the paths to health, namely, the ways in which individuals and organizations both directly and indirectly affect health by the ways in which they influence the pre-conditions and co-conditions for the well-being of individuals and communities. Next, it illustrates how IT can impact each of those paths, emphasizing organizational uses in support of community groups, especially among less-advantaged people. These modes include lifestyle changes, economic capacity-building, health services provision, and community action. Finally it suggest supportive policies that would be necessary to promoting positive versus negative health effects of IT for community populations. These policies exist in incipient forms in some countries of Europe and less so in North America.

Environmental health · Community Health and Development · Global Public Health Policies and Epidemiology · Health Policy Implementation Science · Medicine

• Knowledge development and evaluation in, of and for Healthy Community initiatives. Part II

  Open Access•Blake Poland, Blake D Poland•Health Promotion International•1996

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