Engaging Communities in Dengue Prevention: Strategies, Capacity Building, and Models

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COMMUNITY HEALTH
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Dengue fever is the disease which is caused by a dengue virus. It is a mosquito-borne
disorder that normally occurs in subtropical and tropical areas of the globe. The mild form of
dengue caused a high fever, muscle and joint pain, and rash. The severe type of dengue fever
also known as dengue haemorrhagic fever is able to cause the sudden decrease in blood
pressure, severe bleeding and even death. It is transmitted to the people by Aedes aegypti
and Aedes albopictus (Ahmad, Fazal, Ayaz, Abbasi, Mohammad, & Fazal, 2011). Nearly 2.5
billion people are living in the areas with high risk of dengue transmission. According to the
World Health Organisation, nearly 50 to 100 million infections occur worldwide and nearly
22,000 death has been caused specifically in children. In 2015 the number of cases was
increased from 2.2 million to 3.2 million worldwide (Guzman & Istúriz, 2010). Dengue is not
a problem of a particular country or state is has been affecting people from all over the world.
Therefore community engagement in the prevention of this health issues is the key strategy.
In this particular report, the methods to engage the community to address the dengue issues,
community empowerment and ownership, and models & approaches to health promotion will
be discussed.
Dengue fever is the health issue that can only be mitigated from the root with the help
of communities’ engagement in the health promotion activities. The Laverack’s ladder of
community-based interaction provides different strategies about how to engage the
communities in the health promotion program. It provides single interpretation of what, in
practice, is often the complicated and dynamic process. The rungs of the ladder intended to
clarify the interaction of a complex combination of concepts. However, the concept discussed
in this approach does not exist in the civil society. They can be developed with the time in an
attempt to explain how the public communities worked, sometimes on anecdotal experience
bases and sometimes via advanced systematic means. The ladder of community-based
interaction provides a framework from the community readiness, to engagement, to

COMMUNITY HEALTH
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participation, development, organization, collective action, capacity building and community
empowerment (Laverack, 2007).
The first strategy to engage the community to address the health issue is readiness. It
is the state of the community preparedness to involve in a partnership with an external agent
to implement the dengue prevention program. To achieve this state the communities need to
move through different stages to implement an effective health programme. Community
readiness approach is to imply a willingness of interaction between the members and the
people in the community. In this approach, the interaction has been built on the basis of some
questionnaires and interviewing people to get the information’s related to the particular health
issues in the community or area. Next strategy is community participation which develops the
interaction with the people so that they can address the broad information related to their
ideas and expertise about how to mitigate the common health issues (dengue fever). It
generally represents by few members of the community as it is not possible to participate
everyone (Press, 2009). UNICEF was amongst the first commentators on the community
involvement to involve the community.
Engagement of community is the third strategy which can be used to engage people to
solve issues related to dengue fever. It is used to include people to identify the problem-
solving approaches to address the dengue-related health issues. This collaborative step
includes some steps such as listening and communications need assessment, working together
in partnership and participation. The very first step is the listening and communication.
Community engagement starts by informing people about the dengue fever, its effect and
how they can personally mitigate these issues on their own. A lack of understating about the
prevention strategies can be solved by having a clearer and more accurate targeted knowledge
and information. This can be done by using one-way channels, social media, and mass media.