In this area of responsibility, this is where we begin to serve as a health education and health promotion resource person. One of the first steps in this process (which is also required in many other programs and processes), is assessing the need(s) for health-related information specific to your cause or program. Developing a needs assessment will address questions concerning what information to seek, obtain, and disseminate to your target population. This requires the health education specialist to identify valid sources while ensuring that the information found is accurate, relevant to the program topic, and up to date. Since much of this information is complex or difficult for the general public to understand, it is very important to revise the information (without majorly changing the content) in a way that can be easily read and understood by the majority population (or your target population). It is then that the health educator can share this tailored health-related information with their patient or client. Another responsibility of serving as a health education and health promotion resource person is to extend this acquired knowledge to others by training them to use health education and health promotion skills so they can act as a resource as well. This requires a training needs assessment of potential participants, a plan to conduct and carry out the training, identifying the resources necessary for the training program, implementation of the training program, and the evaluation of the training program. Feedback must be used in the evaluation of the training program in order to create and improve upon future training programs. Last, health educators must be able to provide guidance and consultation on various health-related issues. As always, health educators must always provide professional, unbiased advice and assistance, and apply ethical principles in all relationships with their clients.

 

Within my role at the Northwest Florida Cancer Control Collaborative (NWFCCC), I have obtained and disseminated health-related information pertinent to our current goal(s) (6.1). An example of this is when I identified the need to have information beyond the three top cancers affecting each county within our region (6.1.1). We now wanted to know which cancers were the least reported and wanted to expand that knowledge to identify the top six cancers in each county. I used Florida Charts to find and obtain this current and up to date information (6.1.3) which is a valid and credible source for statistical health-related information for the state of Florida (6.1.2). I then put this information in an Excel spreadsheet to be easily read by our members (6.1.4) and then shared this information on our virtual conference call (6.1.5). Another document I’ve been compiling includes professional resources from each county within our region to be placed on our new website to be accessed by Floridians. We identified a need for our priority population to benefit from this information (6.1.1), used collaborative members in each county to gather current (6.1.3), reputable, and professional resources (6.1.2), transferred that information into another spreadsheet (for our organization) which will then be placed in the appropriate part of the website (6.1.4) (for our target population), so they can access this information when needed (6.1.5).

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Artifacts:

Top 6 Cancers in NWFL Spreadsheet

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