Week One Discussion 1

In this first week of epidemiology, we are exploring Chapters 1 – 5 of Gordis. This covers a lot of information from the history of epidemiology through in-depth topics on how to appropriate evaluate disease occurrence through quantitative means. This week, you need to build a community health profile of the deficits in your community. Community Health Assessments (CHA) and Community Health Improvement Plans (CHIP) have become all the rage in health departments. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have required every health department to engage in CHIPs and CHAs as a part of their accreditation process.

There are robust sets of aggregated data out there both in raw form that you can download and manipulate on your own or in a pre-digested mode that has already been summarized and provided for you. Some resources that you may find helpful:

· Kids Data

· CHIS

· County Health Rankings

· BRFSS

· CDC Wonder

· YBRSS

You can use as many or as few of the above resources as you want, or you can use Journals and other data sources to help you meet this requirement.

In this discussion, you are going to assess a community of your choosing (County SAN DIEGO or State level CALIFORNIA) and select two areas in which they have poor data outcomes. You will then compare either the County to the State or the State to the Nation UNITED STATES to build your evidence that there is an issue. This post must contain some measurement of epidemiology in some fashion. It cannot be subjective and it must be based on rates, ratios or some other type of quantitative measure. The initial post must be between 350 – 500 words, APA FORMAT.