Community Health Program Proposal: Improvements in Dealing with Cancer

Planning Better Health for The Future: Community Health Program Proposal
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Introduction
The initiative Healthy People 2020 has the key role of ensuring that the health of all Americans has been improved by ensuring that the health objectives have not only been put into place but have also been monitored to attain the set objectives. The initiative has a total of 43 topics as well as objectives whose main aim is to guide the main objective of ensuring that the health of all Americans is improved. One key topic in the initiative is on how to deal with the cancer menace and the main aim is to reduce the mortality rate of cancer while also decreasing the total number of cancer cases. Thus this paper seeks to propose a community health program that will be effective and suitable in ensuring that there will be improvements in dealing with cancer by the year 2020.
Overview of the program
To ensure that the Healthy People 2020 initiative is successful, the government needs to come up with a door to door screening program to ensure that everyone gets screened for cancer. Black et al., (2014), conceptualizes that developing this initiative will ensure that people who have never gone for screening will be screened and this will aid in early detection of cancer. The door to door screening will also help in spreading awareness on the main causes of cancer and how it can either be reduced or treated. Further, this program will also be essential to the racial and ethnic minorities who have been identified as the population with high mortality rates resulting from cancer. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that African American men and women tend to suffer from cancer than any other ethnic group in the United States (CDC, 2017). Cancer survivors should also be included in the door to door exercises to not only encourage the screening but to also give hope to those found suffering from the disease. If possible, the survivor should be of the same ethnicity to create a spark to the predicted changes. Early detection more so for the ethnic groups with high cancer mortality rates will aid in early treatment plans and education to live healthy lifestyles which will be beneficial to the patients.
The rationale for the program
Although the increase in technology has enabled a reduction in the number of deaths as a result of cancer, the number of deaths is still high, especially to the ethnic minorities who are at a higher risk of getting the disease and dying from it. Early detection is the only way that cancer can be managed according to health professionals and this proposal can and will promote the early detection of the disease. Although hospitals are offering free cancer screening programs, the initiative is not working properly because some people need to be motivated to go for screening. Guy et al., (2015) has noted that a majority of the people have no idea that such programs are offered and they continue to stay with the mindset that cancer screening is an expensive procedure. Besides, most of the ethnic minorities are made of low waged people, who have multiple jobs and cannot get time to go for cancer screening in hospitals where there are long lines if patients waiting to be served, and if found to have the disease, they will be required to pay large amounts of cash that they do not have to fund their medication and other clinical procedures.
Therefore, if implemented, this program will try to find the people suffering from cancer, provide them with options that can help them manage the disease and reduce costs that could have been used if the cancer discovery was discovered later. If the government wants to achieve the reduction of cancer death, they have to adopt this program.
Making the program culturally competent
To ensure that the program is culturally competent, the stakeholders in the health sector need to develop a strategic plan that will help in setting up the guidelines that could be used in implementing it. This will involve the targeted population, the total costs of the program, goals, and objectives of the program as well as the program’s effectiveness. In the case of carrying out the program countrywide, a lot of resources will be required from the government where the assistance of interest groups is required to ensure that a lot o...