TA Pearson

"Community" is often difficult to define but may best be defined as "an identifiable group on which there is some physical, social, geographic, or other connection among its members. Communities are an important determinant of a person’s health-related behaviors. Community interventions frequently involve multiple media, multiple messages, and multiple target groups. An important concept is community segmentation, with one dimension being early versus late adopter segmentations. Early adopter communities may not require more then surveillance of the cardiovascular disease problem and the education of the early adopter community with mass media about the magnitude of the CVD problem and steps to ameliorate it. Late adopter communities may not change behaviors with surveillance and education alone, but may require additional steps of community organization, provision of health services, and policy and environmental change. These steps are derived from a "bottom-up" approach beginning at the community level to identify partners, environmental issues, local resources, and local media. Community asset mapping identifies organizations relevant to heart health that are active in the community, including health care providers, media, businesses, educational institutions, religious organizations, voluntary agencies, governmental agencies, and non-governmental agencies. The New York State Healthy Heart Program Community Resource Assessment instrument is one such tool to identify community components to activate for heart health programs.