To promote awareness and use of The Guide to Community Preventive Services, also known as The Community Guide, and encourage public health, healthcare, and community-based organizations to implement evidence-based strategies to improve community health outcomes, the Public Health Foundation (PHF) has been working with partners to develop a series of webinars.
 
The most recent webinar, co-sponsored by United Way Worldwide and entitled Using The Guide to Community Preventive Services to Impact Healthy Aging, introduces participants to The Community Guide and how United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley in Allentown, Pennsylvania, uses it to influence community investments and selection of strategies to improve the health of older adults. The archive of this webinar is now available on TRAIN (course ID: 1048690).
 
Corissa Rolón, Manager of Older Adults and Basic Needs Investments at United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley and Director of Lehigh Valley Alliance on Aging, described how these organizations used The Community Guide to create their investment plans, identify performance measures and tools, and develop interventions, such as the Gatekeeper Initiative. The program, which United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley launched in collaboration with their Alliance on Aging community partners, uses untraditional health advocates to help identify at-risk older adults living in the community. Identified individuals are connected to services that can assist with health issues, such as nutrition, physical activity, and access to mental and physical healthcare.

 

United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley adapted their Gatekeeper Initiative by using a case manager to coordinate collaborative care for individuals in need of mental health services, such as treatment for depression. According to the Community Preventive Services Task Force, use of a collaborative care model for management of depressive disorders is a recommended intervention for improving mental health and addressing mental illness.

 

“The Community Guide provided us with a useful recommendation on how to manage depressive disorders through a collaborative care model,” said Rolón. “We learned the importance of gaining early buy-in among community partners and to involve them throughout the entire process.”

 

Participants submitted questions for Ms. Rolón during the live presentation; however, not all questions were addressed, due to the number of questions and time constraints. Visit the PHF Pulse Blog to view some of the questions and answers that were not included in the webinar. 

 

Other webinars on use of The Community Guide include:

For questions, contact Cheryl DeAguiar at cdeaguiar@phf.org.