Community Interventions for Health (CIH)

Three main components:

• Community coalition-building – key stakeholders work together to encourage healthy lifestyle change throughout the community, such as advocating for bicycle paths and smoke-free environments or creating farmers’ markets.

• Health education – dissemination of health messages, such as the training of health professionals, using mass media, social marketing or peer educators.

• Structural change – structural interventions include advocating for and implementing policy change, environmental change (improving opportunities for physical activity in schools and workplaces) and economic change (reducing taxes on healthy foods). These components interact to create communities in which the healthy choices are the easy choices.

CIH has a combined focus on five key areas:

• Implementation in developing and in-transition communities.

• Implementation in four key settings targeting children and families where they live, work, learn and play.

• Assessment of the interventions through a rigorously designed research study.

• Assessment of how poverty and access affect chronic disease death and disability.

• Comparative analysis between the different sites, using a shared set of measures, with a view to building the roadmap of best practice in chronic disease prevention.