HEALTH PROMOTION PLAN

Health Promotion Plan- Adoloscent Women

Health Promotion Plan- Adoloscent Women

Introduction

The focus of the paper is on the planning the health promotion for the issue of injury and violence prevention among the target population of adolescent females. Practitioners in domestic violence and sexual assault programs have been encouraged by the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control to enhance their activities in violence prevention; however, many practitioners have not been trained in prevention concepts and strategies. Therefore, a needs assessment was undertaken with practitioners in the Domestic Violence Prevention Enhancement and Leadership Through Alliances and the Rape Prevention and Education programs to determine training needs. Results show that practitioners are very interested in primary prevention. They want to learn about working at the community level (rather than the individual level), developing and evaluating prevention activities, and identifying effective primary prevention programs.

Support for Problem from The Literature

Although violence against women, including domestic violence and sexual assault, has been recognized as an important public health problem, most programs and services have focused on responding to violent incidents after they occur rather than on preventing the violence from occurring in the first place (i.e., the primary prevention of violence). This is despite the fact that public health has a long history of designing preventive interventions based on sound program development and evaluation principles (Glanz, Rimer, & Lewis, 2002; Green & Kreuter, 2005). Moreover, the idea of “evidence-based public health practice” (i.e., using research findings, behavioral science theory, and program planning models as the foundation for the development and evaluation of public health programs and policies) has gained prominence in the past decade, building in part on the promotion of evidence-based medicine (Brownson, Baker, Leet, & Gillespie, 2003). Even so, the concept of using evidence-based strategies for the primary prevention of violence against women has not been universally adopted by practitioners who work in the field of violence; thus, there is a dearth of effective, evidence-based, primary prevention public health approaches to avert such violence (Schewe, 2006; Whitaker, Baker, & Arias, 2006). The paucity of effective evidence-based programs aimed at the primary prevention of violence against women is understandable when one considers the etiology of this violence, the research base concerning this problem, and the training and orientation of many of the community-based practitioners who work in the field of violence against women. The etiology of violence against women is extremely complex, resulting from a variety of forces that operate on several levels, including that of the individual, the family, the community, and the society (Krug, Dahlberg, Mercy, Zwi, & Lozano, 2002). Therefore, no single, simple intervention will be sufficient for the prevention of such violence. There has been little research funding available to foster the design, implementation, and evaluation of programs for the primary prevention of violence against women. As a result, the knowledge base concerning effective preventive interventions in this area is extremely limited. Also, the practitioners working within community-based agencies focused on violence against women, such as domestic violence programs ...