This Texas Toolbox for Community Health Development online is the third edition of the Toolbox. It is a project funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation http://www.rwjf.org/index.jsp through the East Texas Rural Access Program (ETRAP), http://www.etrap.org/ a part of The Southern Rural Access Program (SRAP), http://www.srap.org/ which focuses on enhancing the health workforce and population access to primary health care in eight Southern U.S. states.

The contractor for the Toolbox is Lake Country Area Health Education Center (Lake Country AHEC), http://www.etxahec.org/sr/ an East Texas regional service center located on the campus of the University of Texas Health Center at Tyler, Texas. Its program office is East Texas Area Health Education Center http://www.etxahec.org/ at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), Galveston, Texas. The developer and author of the Toolbox is Linda Moll Smith, M.A.I.S., Assistant Director of Lake Country AHEC.

Originally funded in 1999-2000, the first edition of the Toolbox was a boxed set of 18 self-study components, comprising a portable library of health systems information and tips for the recruitment and retention of health professionals for use by mostly rural Texas communities. Though designed so that information in each component contributed to the overall picture of the dynamics affecting healthcare services and delivery in Texas, individual components could also be examined and applied independently, depending on the user’s priorities. Components were cross-referenced, to guide users in finding the specific information they might need.

Original funding enabled production of 38 complete Toolboxes, which were distributed to public and private agencies, hospital systems and community groups in Texas, and to the other SRAP states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and West Virginia. At least two of those states used the Toolbox as a model to develop a similar tool.

The Toolbox also included the simultaneously-produced second edition, a bound, stand-alone annotated outline of all referenced resources, similar to the content of this website. The second edition was reprinted several times.

Continuation of funding through 2006 emphasizes a regional recruiter who uses Toolbox information to work with medical and health professional clinical practice sites and recruit providers through a statewide matching database, Texas Practice Sites. http://www.texaspracticesites.org/