What is risk reduction? What are protective factors?
You know your group wants to work on preventing a particular health problem in your community. Most community health organizations have found that the most effective prevention programs work on both reducing risks and enhancing protective factors. But what’s risk reduction? And what are protective factors? Risk reduction means finding out what in your community leads to the problem you’re trying to prevent and then working to cut down on those factors. For example, if you’re working to prevent lung cancer, one of the obvious risks to try to reduce is smoking. Protective factors are those things that keep whatever it is you’re trying to prevent from occurring. For instance, if you work with a coalition to reduce heart disease, a protective factor for your target population would be eating healthy, low-cholesterol food. Protective factors generally help cut down on risks or counteract risks. To demonstrate this, let’s look at how the risk and protective factors work from an example from
