The Planned Approach To Community Health (PATCH) is a community health planning model that was developed in the mid-1980s by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in partnership with state and local health departments and community groups.
PATCH is a process that involves and enables members of a community to plan, implement, and evaluate health promotion and disease prevention programs. The PATCH process helps a community establish a health promotion team, collect and use local data, set health priorities, and design and evaluate interventions.
The goal of PATCH is to increase the capacity of communities to plan, implement, and evaluate comprehensive, community-based health promotion programs targeted toward priority health problems. PATCH objectives aim to reduce the prevalence of modifiable risk factors for the leading causes of preventable disease, death, disability, and injury.
Elements critical to PATCH
Five elements are considered critical to the success of any community health promotion process.
- Community members participate in the process.
- Data guide the development of programs.
- Participants develop a comprehensive health promotion strategy.
- Evaluation emphasizes feedback and program improvement.
- The community capacity for health promotion is increased.
How Does PATCH Work?
The PATCH program is accomplished through a series of phases in which participating community members gain skills in five key areas of community health promotion:
I. Community Organization
An ongoing component of the PATCH program includes:
- Identifying persons for the core and community groups.
- Creating committees.
- Informing the public.
- Gaining local support for the PATCH philosophy.
II. Data Collection
PATCH participants assess the community's health status by looking at morbidity, mortality, and other data, and by conducting community opinion survey.
III. Establish Priorities and Set Objectives
The data is collected and presented to the community group who reach a consensus on the priority chronic health problems to be addressed by the PATCH program. Objectives are established to reduce the leading causes of death and disability and to improve the community's health.
IV. Intervention Planning
To determine what resources are needed, PATCH participants explore existing resources in the community raise funds, identify needed expertise, recruit volunteers, and offer services and provide support to all PATCH activities. A work plan is then developed. This plan outlines these priority issues:
- The targeted chronic disease health problems.
- The selected risk factor(s) for the targeted chronic disease(s).
- The target group(s).
- The intervention approach.
- The method(s) of communication for reaching the target group(s).
- The plan of accomplishing the intervention objectives.
Evaluation
Evaluation is used to determine the success of the intervention and to monitor the entire PATCH process:
- Is the intervention achieving its objectives?
- Should the intervention(s) be changed, expanded, or repeated?
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