Public Health : Power, Empowerment and Professional Practice

by Laverack, Glenn

• ISBN13: 9781403945600
• ISBN10: 1403945608
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-07-22
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This book addresses for the first time, in a practical way, how public health professionals can help their clients to gain power. It offers sound theoretical principles and practical solutions for transforming power relations to improve public health practice. It also introduces readers to a new methodology to plan, implement and evaluate empowering public health programs.

Author Biography

Glenn Laverack is Director of Health Promotion at the School of Population Health, University of Auckland, New Zealand. He has worked as a Public Health Consultant, and a specialist in health promotion and community capacity building for over 15 years in countries as diverse as Ghana, Fiji, Vanuatu, Australia, India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. His previous publications include Health Promotion: Power and Empowerment (2004).

Table of Contents

List of tables, figures and boxes	viii
Acknowledgements	x
Preface	xi
An overview of the book	xiii
1 Power and public health practice	1	(13)
An empowering approach to public health practice	1	(3)
Helping individuals to gain power	4	(1)
Helping groups and communities to gain power	5	(2)
Public health programming	7	(3)
'Parallel-tracking' empowerment in public health programming	10	(4)
2 Public health in context	14	(13)
Public health Practitioners and their clients	14	(1)
Power and public health practice in bureaucratic settings	15	(2)
Professional versus lay interpretations of health	17	(4)
Empowerment and public health discourse	21	(2)
Public health and social movement theory	23	(4)
3 Power and empowerment	27	(13)
What is power?	27	(1)
Power-from-within	28	(1)
Power-over	29	(1)
Hegemonic power	30	(1)
Power-with	30	(1)
Zero-sum and non-zero-sum forms of power	31	(2)
What is powerlessness?	33	(2)
What is the means to attaining power?	35	(1)
Cultural and contextual interpretations of power and empowerment	36	(4)
4 Helping individuals to gain power	40	(17)
Practitioners as more effective communicators	40	(1)
One-to-one communication	41	(2)
Learning to listen	43	(2)
Combining communication channels	45	(2)
Increasing the critical self-awareness of clients	47	(1)
Mapping positions of power	47	(1)
Ranking complex issues	48	(1)
Strategies for decision making	49	(1)
Developing a strategic plan for decision making	50	(2)
Fostering an empowering professional-client relationship	52	(1)
The power of language	53	(4)
5 Helping groups and communities to gain power	57	(18)
What is a 'community'?	57	(1)
Community empowerment as a 5-point continuum	58	(2)
The 'domains' of community empowerment	60	(3)
A framework for helping groups and communities to gain power	63	(1)
Empowering individuals for action	64	(2)
Empowering groups	66	(3)
Empowering groups for the development of community organisations	69	(3)
Empowering community organisations to develop partnerships	72	(1)
Empowering communities to take social and political action	73	(2)
6 Helping marginalised groups to gain power	75	(14)
Introduction	75	(2)
A case study of helping marginalised groups to gain power	77	(1)
The public health context	78	(1)
An approach to promote health and empowerment	78	(1)
Strengthening community empowerment	79	(3)
Building healthy public policy and creating a supportive environment	82	(3)
Dealing with conflict	85	(4)
7 The measurement and visual representation of empowerment	89	(21)
Developing a working definition of power and empowerment	89	(1)
Collecting and analysing qualitative information	89	(5)
Collecting and analysing qualitative information in a cross-cultural context	94	(3)
The measurement of empowerment	97	(5)
Visual representations of community empowerment	102	(1)
The interpretation and visual representation of community empowerment	103	(7)
8 Power, empowerment and professional practice	110	(10)
Introduction	110	(2)
Addressing the constraints in public health practice	112	(1)
Building a better understanding of the meaning of power and empowerment	113	(1)
Addressing the bureaucratic constraints	113	(2)
Using an empowering approach to public health programming	115	(1)
Using measurement to empower others	116	(1)
Understanding the means to empower individual clients, groups and communities	117	(1)
The practical application of the ideas in the book	118	(2)
References	120	(6)
Index	126