Summary

In this extended case study, you have learned that:

1. Creating a community profile is one of the first tasks that is expected of a health professional.
2. A good community profile will contain social and economic features that will help the healthworkers understand who is in the community.
3. Community profiles also contain health data that will show what illnesses are the most important in the community.
4. Data for the community profile can be collected by the healthworkers or by specially trained volunteers going from house to house.
5. Health data can be collected from official sources and may be either quantitative or qualitative, or a mixture of both types of data.
6. The data collected by a number of methods will establish the most important diseases to be tackled in the community.
7. A detailed plan of implementation will be required to tackle the health problems that have been identified.
8. Monitoring of the execution of campaigns is important to examine their success, and the control of knowing how much has changed is important too.
9. Management is an integral part of the role of a health professional.