Ensuring consistency and continuity of violence prevention is vital for any community. For this reason, authorities must allocate resources adequately so that they can support the evolution of entrepreneurship, enhancement of healthcare service quality, and maintenance of education efficiency. In other words, ensuring community health is essential. As the CommunityHealthSim online simulation has shown, the necessity to build a funding system that will allow spending a substantial amount on entrepreneurship, health, public safety, and education is vital for the community well-being (“CommunityHealthSim,” n.d.). Due to the inherent and mutual connection between the specified factors, the need to invest proportionally into the selected sectors while ensuring that each specific issue is addressed is vital.
In the course of the simulation, the tokens were allocated equally among the four sectors in question (2 tokens per each resource). The reason for the specified decision concerns the balance in which these areas coexist. Though seemingly unrelated, healthcare, entrepreneurship, education, and public safety are strongly tied to one another. Namely, education leads to higher employment rates and increased entrepreneurship development since community members gain critical skills for starting a business at a fairly young age (Widayati et al., 2018). Similarly, higher education rates suggest lower levels of crime, as recent studies have confirmed. As for the public safety issue, protecting the community against crime allows people to engage actively in professional development and contribute to the enhancement of economic progress (Widayati et al., 2018). Therefore, the two notions are directly linked to each other.
Likewise, investing in healthcare is principal due to the presence of multiple health concerns. Apart from the pandemic, which requires that citizens should undergo vaccination against new Covid-19 variants, managing major public health issues such as obesity and diabetes is crucial (Lohr et al., 2018). The proposed measures will allow people to focus on education and entrepreneurship, thus, meeting their self-actualization goals (Lohr et al., 2018). Indeed, the improvement of health services should be seen as the primary concern affecting the performance of the rest of the sectors.
Last but not least, public safety requires significant investments since increased crime rates will inevitably destroy the community. Specifically, increased crime rates will cause the development of gang violence with the resulting surge in juvenile delinquency. As a result of a rise in juvenile crime, the education setting will become increasingly unsafe, causing students to drop out of school. Finally, businesses will suffer due to the threat that criminal activities will pose (Fischer et al., 2018). Therefore, each of the four aspects of community health identified in the simulation must be maintained and controlled.
The simulation has offered an important lesson by demonstrating the connection between different aspects of the community health level. Specifically, the links between its different sectors, namely, entrepreneurship, healthcare, education, and public safety have been delineated. Moreover, the simulation has shown the importance of having the capacity and skills to respond to emergent issues timely and introduce the required measures, including financial resources and respective interventions. Overall, CommunityHealthSim should be seen as an important tool in visualizing the change that investment into the key sectors produces in a community. However, it offers an even more important lesson in showing how crucial it is to plan the funding carefully and introduce changes as emergent issues shape the levels of community health.
References
CommunityHealthSim. (n.d.). VetoViolence.CDC.gov, Web.
Fischer, K. R., Schwimmer, H., Purtle, J., Roman, D., Cosgrove, S., Current, J. J., & Greene, M. B. (2018). A content analysis of hospitals’ community health needs assessments in the most violent US cities. Journal of Community Health, 43(2), 259-262. Web.
Lohr, A. M., Ingram, M., Nuñez, A. V., Reinschmidt, K. M., & Carvajal, S. C. (2018). Community–clinical linkages with community health workers in the United States: a scoping review. Health Promotion Practice, 19(3), 349-360. Web.
Widayati, M. Y., Tamtomo, D., & Adriani, R. B. (2018). Factors affecting quality of health service and patient satisfaction in community health centers in North Lampung, Sumatera. Journal of Health Policy and Management, 2(2), 165-175. Web.