WITHDRAWN: Community Immunity: Building an NGO to Deliver Health Promotion/Disease Prevention Education to Underresourced Communities

PRESENTATION TYPE: TED Type Talk

CATEGORY/THEMES: Effectiveness of prevention science for public health impact at scale throughout the world; Optimizing interventions to be implemented more efficiently and effectively by continuing to study and enhance programs as they are implemented in dynamic real-world settings; Leveraging new technologies to deliver content and engage individuals, families, and communities; Engaging in long-term prevention science-practice partnerships that enhance local, state and/or national health and well-being goals

TITLE: Community Immunity: Delivering Health Promotion/Disease Prevention Education to Under-Resourced Communities"

ABSTRACT BODY: Vaccines immunize against disease. When enough people are vaccinated, they protect the unvaccinated around them through “community immunity.” Likewise, providing health education to as many people in a community as possible helps the entire community combat threatening health issues in the same way. Over the past 20 years, our NGO, WiRED International, has delivered computer and web-based, peer reviewed health promotion/disease prevention education to under-resourced communities worldwide through the Community Health Education Library we have developed. There are more than 400 peer-reviewed modules on topics such as Zika, Leptospirosis, Ebola, Rheumatic Heart Disease, Maternal/Child Health, Nutrition, Substance Use Prevention, Cancer Prevention and Treatment for grassroots community members, including school children to health professionals to public officials. They are in a variety of languages, contain learning assessments and final exams, and we provide certificates for successful completion of a series. We have three distribution models: 1. The Center Model--where people come to us in a community location, 2. The Outreach Model—using portable equipment to take the lessons to where the people are, 3. The Global Distribution Model-distributing our materials through the Internet and downloads. We deliver these materials to such places as war-ravaged Iraq and post-war former Yugoslavia to the slums of Kenya to the remote Amazon jungle, and have begun delivering our materials to low resource regions in the U.S., as well. These valuable learning materials are made available free-of-charge worldwide.

In this talk, we describe our content development and distribution model and research documenting the effectiveness and sustainability of this type of learning toward our goal of community immunity. Finally, we discuss how social media (specifically Facebook) has disseminated the learning to those who need it the most as rapidly as possible, enhancing the capacity of the community to improve its collective health.