Middlesbrough Community Health Profile

Community profiling what is it? Whats a community, should be the first question. Reviewing the literature there are many different opinions and definitions of what a community is. Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton (1985) state “A community is a group of people who are socially interdependent, who participate together in discussion and decision making, and who share certain practices that both define the community and are nurtured by it. Such a community is not quickly formed. It almost always has a history and so is also a community of memory, defined in part by its past and its memory of the past.”   Additionally Graves (1992) also suggests a community as an “environment in which people interact in a cohesive manner, continually reflecting upon the work of the group while always respecting the differences individual members bring to the group.” The two definition have many colliding ideas that a community is a group of people, who share an environment, values and goals and work together to achieve them. Taking these definitions into account what is a community profile.

Hawtins and Percy- Smith (2007) define community profiling as “A comprehensive description of the needs of a population that is defined, or defines itself, as a community, and the resources that exist within that community, carried out with the active involvement of the community itself, for the purpose of developing an action plan or other means of improving the quality of life of the community.”   Barnardos (2004) give a simpler definition “A community profile is an attempt to describe a particular community or neighbourhood. It uses a variety of different techniques to build up a picture of the community from a number of perspectives.” So both definitions explain that it is a study on a community which indeed it is. Hawtins and Percy-Smith go into more detail stating that a community profile is about coming up with an action plan to improve the quality of life for a given community....