As afore identified, mental health forms an area of concern in as far as the achievement of overall community health is concerned. The health outcomes of an individual are majorly determined by their state of mental health (Jorm, 2012). Mental health issues such as stress and depression have an enormous impact on an individual’s quality of life. These issues affect many spheres of life including; social, economic and health (Thoits, 2013). This being the case, there is the need for a health promotion intervention purposely intended to promote mental health. Achieving an optimal level of mental at a community level requires a multi-pronged approach that aims at addressing the potential causes of mental health issues and equipping people with proactive measures to prevent mental stress or to cope in the event of a stressful or a mentally disturbing situation (Elliott, Huizinga & Menard, 2012).
The causative factors of mental health issues as well as threats to mental health are widespread in a person’s environment and in this regard, the health promotion intervention for this project would utilize community-wide interventions such as public education on how to go about promoting mental health, either at home, school or work and subsequently preventing the occurrence of any situation that could compromise mental health (Caplan, 2013). More precisely, this health promotion would involve offering mental health education within the households, institutions such as schools and corporate organizations, whereby focus would be on creating awareness on the need for creating mentally-rewarding work, school and home environments as well as providing psychological counseling to persons affected by mental health issues. This health promotion intervention would take place in a span of 6 months.
The evaluation of this health promotion undertaking would use both formative and summative assessment approaches. The formative assessment would go a long way in determining the effectiveness of the implementation process itself and as such, play a vital role in unearthing the project’s weaknesses beforehand and subsequently, help in making the necessary improvements so as to meet the ultimate objectives. On the other hand summative assessment helps in mapping the success rate of the overall program in the very end.
For the purposes of formative assessment, open-ended questionnaires would be issued to the participants after every two weeks during the course of implementation whereby, questions would seek to determine individual participant’s perceptions with regard to the intervention, including self-reported mental health improvements, improved stress coping skills as well as positive lifestyle modifications as a result of the intervention. On the other hand, these questionnaires would be used to collect information related to efforts undertaken at a household, institutional and organizational level, to promote mental wellness. Considering that the questionnaires would be open-ended, suggestions on how to improve the overall strategy would be provided by the participants. The findings of the formative assessment would help in providing updates with regard to whether the implementation process is achieving the intended milestones.
On the other hand, for the purposes of summative assessment, a pre and post intervention approach would be used. Data related to the incidence of mental health issues as well as perceptions about mental health (subjective data through questionnaires) would be collected for the participants before and after the intervention. These two data sets would be subsequently compared through statistical approaches. The SPSS software would be used for this data analysis whereby linear regression and correlation tests (Pearson correlation at a confidence level of 95%) would be used to compare the two data sets.
References
Caplan, G. (2013). An approach to community mental health (Vol. 3). Routledge.
Elliott, D. S., Huizinga, D., & Menard, S. (2012). Multiple problem youth: Delinquency, substance use, and mental health problems. Springer Science & Business Media.
Jorm, A. F. (2012). Mental health literacy: empowering the community to take action for better mental health. American Psychologist, 67(3), 231.
Thoits, P. A. (2013). Self, identity, stress, and mental health. In Handbook of the sociology of mental health (pp. 357-377). Springer Netherlands.
