• Ann M Essay, Chelsey R Schlechter, Carrie A Mershon, Alissa V Fial, Jennie Ellison, Richard R Rosenkranz, and David A Dzewaltowski.
• Department of Health Promotion, College of Public Health, University of Nebraska Medical Center, 984365 Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NE 68198-4365, USA. Electronic address: ann.essay@unmc.edu.
• Prev Med. 2021 Dec 1; 153: 106769.

AbstractWhole-of-community interventions delivered across entire geospatial areas show promise for improving population health for youth cancer prevention. The aims of this scoping review were to synthesize the whole-of-community intervention literature on six modifiable risk factors in youth for cancer prevention (alcohol use, diet, obesity, physical activity, sun exposure, tobacco use) and to develop and apply a typology describing the inclusion of fundamental control system functional characteristics. A systematic search was conducted in PubMed, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Embase, PsycINFO, and Scopus for studies published to the end of 2019. Eligible studies included a geospatially defined whole-of-community intervention; youth 0-18 years; and at least one of the six cancer risk factor outcomes. An iterative process was undertaken to create a typology describing the functions for whole-of-community interventions guided by systems theory, and the typology was used to code the included interventions. A total of 41 interventions were included. Most interventions (43.9%) assessed multiple cancer risk factors. Few interventions provided fundamental functions necessary for community system coordination: sensor, controller, effector. Although communities are a patchwork quilt of microsystems where individuals interact in geographically bounded places nested within larger whole systems of influence, a control systems approach has not been used to frame the literature. Whole-of-community interventions can be characterized by the fundamental system functions necessary for coordinating population health improvement. Future whole-of-community intervention efforts should draw on fundamental knowledge of how systems operate and test whether adoption of the key functions is necessary for whole-of-community population health improvement.Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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