The following is a summary of “Engaging Communities in Emerging Infectious Disease Mitigation to Improve Public Health and Safety,” published in the July 2024 issue of Infectious Disease by Barak et al.
The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated the need for health preparedness. The community health-safety climate (HSC) measure is developed to analyze health behaviors during a pandemic.
Researchers conducted a retrospective study to fill the gap between measures taken at the organizational level and individuals at the community level.
They studied qualitative and quantitative data from a February 2021 national survey to test reliability, multilevel construct, and predictive and nomologic validities. The HSC measure was unidimensional (Cronbach α=0.87). All communities had intense health-safety climates but with significant differences between communities (F=10.65; P<0.001), and HSC levels predicted readiness to adopt health-safety behaviors.
The results showed the relationship between HSC level and behavioral indicators and higher climate homogeneity with strong correlations.
They concluded that the HSC measure can predict community readiness to adopt health-safety behaviors in communities to inform interventions before diseases spread, providing a valuable tool for public health authorities and policymakers during a pandemic.
Source: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38916575/
