Guidelines: To complete this milestone, you will need to begin exploring scholarly literature to identify a public health problem of interest. The actual review of the literature will be submitted in Milestone Two. The literature selected to define your problem should be recent—preferably within the last five years. To understand the epidemiology of the problem, trends, disparities, and health determinants, you may choose a review article that summarizes this information. In addition, the final project for this capstone requires you to identify a public health intervention that addresses the selected problem. In general, you should identify programs and interventions that have already been used to address this problem. You will get ideas about how these programs were implemented and to what extent they worked from reviewing existing literature. You may propose to modify an intervention that you found in your review to more closely address the needs of the population and community you choose for the capstone final project. The literature you identify in this step will be the basis of the literature you review for Milestone Two. Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed:
Statement of the Problem- A. Briefly discuss the public health problem, including epidemiological patterns, trends, and populations affected. Is this a population or individual health problem?
B. Analyze the social determinants of health- and social justice-related disparities that impact the distribution of this problem in a community or target population. C. Briefly discuss your program proposal’s objectives and its logic model for planning. Would your program proposal focus on prevention or treatment?
D. Conduct an assessment of a need in your community, ensuring the inclusion of a description of the community and how this proposed program may improve the health, safety, and quality of life for people in it. Be sure to specify the ecological framework for health problems within the community. Note that you will not conduct a full community needs assessment; rather, you will identify a need through a preliminary review of local newspapers or other relevant sources. From there, you will research what is out there, what is missing, what others have done to solve the problem, and so on. E. Based on your program proposal’s objectives and your assessment of the need in the community, evaluate project methods such as study/intervention design and statistical issues related to sampling, measurement, and analysis for their strengths and weaknesses in addressing the public health problem you have identified. (Attached will be a paper which gives a brief description of the problem).
