Marian V. Hamburg

Book Reviews : Health Promotion Indicators & Actions, Snehendu B. Kar, Ed., Springer Publishing Company, New York, 1989, 320 pp

Whenever I struggle with how to evaluate a health education program plan, I envy the easy job that salespeople have in evaluating the outcomes of their efforts. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to count up the number of items sold from a shelf? Or to press a computer to get a stock inventory? And to know the exact amount of money received-and to be able instantly to determine the profit/loss picture? The term &dquo;measurable objectives&dquo; presents no challenge to those who push products. It’s an entirely different story for those involved in health promotion programming. When you move beyond the traditional health status measurements such as morbidity and mortality toward assessments of health behaviors over a period of time, the difficulty of establishing standards and collecting data is immediately apparent. Assessment of outcomes becomes even harder when environmental, political, economic, and other social factors beyond the control of a health program must be considered. And yet the health needs of today demand that national priority be given to disease prevention and health promotion goals that are seldom easy to quantify. Health Promotion Indicators & Actions, edited by Snehendu Kar, attempts to make this assessment job easier. The editor states his purpose: &dquo;to review the development and use of appropriate indicators of health promotion actions from the perspective of selected American researchers concerned with public health&dquo; (p. 1). That purpose is well served. Each of the 15 authors makes a significant contribution to the task, which has been organized to focus on a matrix framework that consists of two levels of action (individual and societal) for the promotion of three dimensions of health-physical, mental, and social. Collectively, they succeed in presenting a

Health Education Needs of Alcoholism Services

When New York University’s Department of Health Education was funded in 1975 by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to develop an Alcohol Studies specialization as part of our Community Health Education masters program, we had no certain knowledge about the job market for the people we would be preparing. We believed that there was an immense prevention job to be done in the alcoholism field, and we had a pretty good idea that trained health educators were a relatively scarce resource in that field. Beyond that, we felt that our Project had a sound theoretical base, namely that people prepared at the graduate level in community health education and with knowledge of alcohol problems would have a good deal to offer the alcoholism field.