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Research & Policy

Prevention: The critical need
Jack Pransky

This guidebook to primary prevention methods for policymakers and practitioners observes that limited funds focus on the prevention of ATOD use, emotional disorders, and health education, compared to investments in treatment and law enforcement activities. The author identifies three levels of prevention: (1) primary - aimed at the general community to promote healthy individuals, disease resistance, and good citizenship by changing environments, promoting health and awareness, building skills, and providing supports; (2) secondary (intervention) - working with individuals at risk or in crisis, stepping in to assess problems at an early stage and recommend solutions, defusing crises, teaching skills to change behavior and the situations individuals react to; and (3) tertiary (treatment) - striving to rehabilitate, treat, and rebuild individual behavior and health.

The book concentrates on primary prevention, describing successful community prevention strategies and research findings based in child care and early childhood education settings, schools, communities, and in the workplace. It also considers peer and parent-focused prevention activities, individual prevention and health education, and the social policies needed to be successful. Careful planning, community involvement, pragmatic evaluation, and good marketing strategies buttress these avenues to prevention. The author calls for special attention to nurturing prevention workers. He suggests that substance abuse, as well as child abuse and neglect, crime, suicide, teenage pregnancy, and mental illness are all the result of people being given unhealthy self-perceptions.

Effective preventive programs involve multiple systems and many strategies; target all group members, not just those at high risk; work to change the environmental circumstances that contribute to social problems; collaborate with other social service systems; involve the community in program building; focus on goals and behavior change; influence people of all ages; have both quality and volume; spread messages to all parts of daily life; adapt programs to community cultural needs; attract young people; reinforce that prevention is cost-effective; and have long-term commitment.

Burrell Foundation and Paradign Press
Distributed by Jack Pransky
c/o Prevention Unlimited
RD Box 134
Cabot, VT 05647
(802) 563-2730
(1991, 386 pp.; $24.95 + p/h)





 

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