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COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION IN PREVENTION OF COMMUNICABLE DISEASES IN RURAL AREAS OF PAKISTAN: A REVIEW OF LITERATURE

BACKGROUND: There is huge burden of both communicable and non-communicable diseases in healthcare systems. Community engagement is the diverse beneficial relationship between community stakeholders, primary healthcare system and professionals over a wide variety of tasks, their role and participation in decision making for enhancing community health. 
OBJECTIVES: This paper focuses to present the use of Ladder of Community Participation as a framework to integrate community health problems in Pakistan. Additional focus is on local issues and the integration of the model according to socio-politico-economic structure of Pakistan 
METHODS: Research articles were reviewed from PubMed, Medline, EBSCO, and CINAHL. Different key words such as “community engagement”, “community participation”, “communicable diseases”, “Ladder framework”, were used along with focus on the most recent and human based studies. After thorough review of the abstracts, selected researches were used to integrate the concept of community engagement in prevention of communicable diseases. 
REVIEW: Review of the literature showed that local healthcare services alone cannot make sufficient efforts to uplift the health status of the communities. Community based collaborative interventions are often cost effective, sustainable and effective in managing outbreaks and other communicable diseases. It is imperative to engage the local communities and its stakeholders for an informative, collaborative and success oriented approach. Moreover, educating the community stakeholders for on-going basis can be an asset to the public health initiatives in the community. The ladder of community participation presented in this paper guides the public health workers and community stakeholders for step-wise integration of community and its resources in different programs about communicable disease prevention. 
CONCLUSION: This ladder presents a continuum of different approaches, which will help in planning program management, feasibility assessment, evaluating ongoing interventions along with modification, and expanding community engagement approaches.