Healthy People 2020: three community problems and a plan

One requirement changes the whole shape of this paper and it appears almost as an aside: you must include the zip code of the city or county you choose. That is not a formatting detail, it is the assignment's way of forcing local data. A paper about obesity in America will satisfy none of the three tasks the prompt sets, because it cannot say how the problem affects your community, cannot say how it was identified locally, and cannot propose a containment plan with anyone in it. So choose your area first, find out what data actually exists for it, and let that determine your three problems. County health rankings, state and local health department reports, and CDC data portals will all disaggregate to county level, and some to zip code. If your three problems have no local numbers behind them, you have chosen the wrong three and it is much cheaper to discover that now.

The prompt offers two routes and they lead to different papers, so choose deliberately rather than mixing them. The first route is three population or community based problems drawn from the Healthy People topic areas: disease, disaster, crime, accidents, falls and so on. The second, offered as an alternative, is three community infectious outbreaks identified from the CDC outbreak listings, measles being the example given. The first route gives you chronic and injury topics with rich local surveillance data and slow-moving indicators. The second gives you acute events with clear identification stories and containment plans that are genuinely operational, which suits the assignment's language about how they were identified and how to contain them. The outbreak route is usually the stronger paper if your area has had a real event, because every part of the prompt has an answer that is documented somewhere. Say in the paper which route you took and why, since the marker cannot otherwise tell.

How they were identified is the requirement most papers pass over and it is worth a section of its own for each problem. Identification is a real process with named mechanisms: notifiable disease reporting from clinicians and laboratories, syndromic surveillance of emergency department presentations, vital statistics, hospital discharge data, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, trauma registries, and for outbreaks, case finding that begins with a clinician noticing something unusual and telephoning a health department. Say which mechanism found your problem, because the answer explains a great deal about how quickly it was found and what was missed. Falls in older adults show up in emergency department data long after the first fall; a measles cluster shows up when one alert clinician makes a call. That contrast is exactly the kind of analysis this section rewards. Say also what each system would have missed, because that is the limitation the plan has to work around.

The plan of action must be based on Healthy People 2020, so it should connect to the framework's actual structure rather than merely cite it. That means naming the topic area and the specific objective your plan addresses, using the objective's own baseline and target as the measure of success, and referring to the leading health indicators where they apply. A plan that says we will raise awareness is not a plan; a plan that names the objective, states the local baseline, sets an interim target, identifies who does what, and says how it will be measured is one. Address the social and environmental determinants too, since Healthy People 2020 built them into its framework and containment plans that ignore transport, housing or language access fail for predictable reasons rather than mysterious ones. Name the objective by its number where the framework gives one, so the connection is checkable.

On execution, the formatting requirements are specific and each is checkable: APA format, a minimum of 1,500 words excluding the title and reference pages, Arial 12, at least four evidence-based references, and the zip code stated. Electronic references must be from reliable sources such as the CDC, so a health department report or a peer-reviewed article counts and a news article generally does not. The paper goes to Turnitin and the stated tolerance is 35 percent, which means direct quotation from the Healthy People objectives should be sparing and paraphrase should be genuine rather than word-swapping. Because it is also posted to the discussion tab for peers to review, write it so a classmate in a different county can compare their area to yours, and be explicit about which findings are local and which are national. Say which county you are writing about early enough that a reader knows what to compare.