Indian Community Health Profile (ICHP) Project
Background
The goal of all Indian health programs is to raise the health status of American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/AN) to the highest possible level. However, measures of Indian health status are typically only available at the national or regional level and may not reflect the health concerns of particular tribal communities. Thus, the increasing number of tribes who have assumed responsibility for their health services from IHS have not been able to assess community health in a way that would inform local efforts to improve it. The Indian Community Health Profile (ICHP) was designed to give tribes a concise, comprehensive, and user- friendly set of indicators with which to assess community health.
The ICHP was developed by a working group of tribal and public health leaders led by Dee Robertson, Past Director of the Northwest Tribal Epidemiology Center, and Tony D’Angelo, Program Statistics Team Leader at IHS Headquarters. It consists of a set of 15 health status indicators that provide a broad picture of overall community health (see The 15 Recommended Indicators). The Profile differs from traditional popuation health status reports in several ways:
It was specifically designed to be a proxy for overall health, rather than the usual collection of morbidity and mortality rates.
It covers multiple domains of health: physical, mental, dental, environmental, and social.
It was not designed to generate standardized data for large area analysis; instead, it was designed to be useful and useable at the community level.
Instead of trying to cover all important measures of health, the Profile contains only 15 measures which are sentinels of health status in five different domains.
With support from the Indian Health Service (IHS) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Profile was piloted in three tribal communities from 1999 - 2002: the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in Idaho, the Fort Peck Tribes of Montana, and the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe in Washington. Each site has successfully identified, collected data for, and analyzed a set of health status measures (including the 15 recommended indicators) that they believe to be reflective of health in their community. The project results have allowed the sites to identify what their most pressing health issues are and which community members are most in need of services. Equipped with the data they collected and the training they received, the tribes are now planning and revising health programs, applying for funding, and conducting further investigation, all with the aim of improving community health status.
Project Activities
After the pilot sites had completed their projects, ICHPP received a second round of funding to expand the project outside the Northwest. Two tribes are participating in Phase II of the project: the Spirit Lake Nation of North Dakota, and the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona. In this phase, we have shifted the primary locus of support for the two sites to tribal epidemiology centers, universities, or other organizations located in the same regions as the tribes. Project staff at NPAIHB continue to provide project templates and technical assistance, but our aim is to enhance, rather than replace, working relationships at the regional level. In effect, Phase II is a “train the trainer” stage, in which regional organizations are gaining the expertise necessary to support implementation of the Profile model in other tribal communities in their jurisdiction in the future.
Inside this Site
The 15 Recommended Indicators
ICHPP Staff
Beyond the Usual Stuff
Newsletter
Profile Project Toolkit [new!]
This is a project of the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board’s EpiCenter. Please call one of our staff if you have any questions. (503) 228-4185
Thank you.
Staff Members:
Tam Lutz, (Lummi), MPH, MHA, Project Director
