A population health framework for inner-city mental health

Dealing with mental health problems in the inner city presents a major challenge to planners and service providers. Traditional mental health service-oriented interventions often prove ineffective due to the complexity of individuals' needs. This article argues that a population health framework can be used to identify critical risk and protective factors and facilitate more effective, upstream, population-based interventions for mental health problems in the inner city. A community report card is seen as a useful measure of key indicators at any point in time and of changes over time at the community or neighborhood level. A number of issues with regard to report card development are identified and discussed, as is the process of creating a report card, including key domains and the organization of findings.