Planning for a community-based hypertension control program in the inner city.

Uncontrolled hypertension is a significant problem among African-Americans residing in inner city environments. To help address the problem, we are developing community-based hypertension control programs in African-American communities located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Chicago, Illinois. The Milwaukee program focuses on an entire, diverse inner city area, while the Chicago program is targeted to several more homogeneous African-American neighborhoods. The investigators hypothesize that the success of a hypertension control program will depend on carefully tailoring the educational approaches to the specific characteristics of the target area. Therefore, the study areas that have been selected differ with regard to community size and diversity, community 'stressors' (poverty, unemployment, crime, etc), and types of organizations which are present in the community. This paper describes the background and the rationale for community hypertension control programs in the inner city. The initial approaches to establishing the program by developing interfaces with the community and the gathering of baseline data through household surveys are described.