Steps Involved in Undertaking Community Assessment - Samples

Question: Discuss about the Steps Involved in Undertaking Community Assessment Answer: Overview of Community Assessment Community assessment is a tool, which enables the proper identification of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and the threats that are prevailing in a community. It also provides relevant information that assists a health care provider to work in sync with a community and simultaneously address their problems or needs. Community assessment also serves as intervention, where it promotes community participation in the assessment process, ownership of the findings and their engagement with the subsequent outcomes. These findings of the ownership facilitate overall community growth and development. (McMurray Clendon, 2015). The Community Assessment helps in the development of the community health for the betterment of the mankind. This specific approach is best applicable in small yet defined areas like villages, small localities or housing estates (Sampson, Gearin Boe, 2015). Hospitals experience a paradigm shift starting from population-based community health planning to planning population-based study. A community health assessment has two basic steps assessment and action. Here the assessment identifies the problems prevailing in the community and the action follows the planning that determines which of these problems should be addressed with which resources. A comprehensive community health planning involves different steps. Profiling of the population This step deals with the information that will help to define the health prospective of the community and their specific health needs. This can be elucidated via noting the down the key characteristics of the population, health status of the people, local factors affecting the health of the residents of the community, whether these affects are positive or negative, the health care services that are commonly being provide to the residents of the community, the perspective of the people on their health parameters and finally the local and the national priorities for health (Hong Scardamalia, 2014). Not only have the health parameters, in order to strictly profile a community before health assessment, the demographic data also needed to be accessed. In the field of demographic data their lies, geographical background of the population, number of people residing in the community, average age group, gender distribution, ethnicity and literacy rate. Furthermore, mortality and the morbidity rate provide the actual reflection of the health framework of a community. Here the mortality describes the pattern of death in relation to age, gender, reason behind death and morbidity rate defines the illness, disability, and their degree of prevalence. Such information can be collected from the hospitals and must be effectively incorporated while community profiling (Barnett, 2012). Other related factors that must be taken into consideration while community profiling are health inequalities, local factors affecting health of the population, work and employment of the youth, poverty and income of the family, environmental condition (pollution, sanitation and housing), social cohesion (networks, migration, sudden pleasure and other leisure) and other existing destabilizing factors (Morris et al., 2014). Collection of information The first step involves the type of health information required to identify health needs of a community and the next preceding step is to collect relevant information. In order to collect information, few approaches must be religiously cited. These include proper description of the community via geographic maps and census information from the local administration. Local views must also be taken into consideration while collecting the data and this can be done by approaching the local individuals or groups, collecting health views from particular professions like school teachers, local dentists, trained pharmacists, social/community workers and religious leaders. After individual surveys, there come the local surveys. Local surveys can be time consuming and in order to safe time, this can be done via citing the disease registers used for chronic illness like diarrhea, diabetes, cholera, yellow fever etc. However, if conducting patient based surveys, confidentiality must be maintained (Pitts et al., 2013). Surveys are at times diplomatic and may lead to misleading results, in order to overcome such false positive results, newspaper reports are cited followed by study of the health measures, nursing information, nursing knowledge and additional family health assessment. The family health assessment is a specialized nursing tool that has three distinct aims: access to the family health needs in collaboration to the family, identification of health services required by the company, proper gain of information for the assessing the accurate need at the community level (Clark, 2015). Assessment of the information The information collected in step 2 must be analyzed in order to plan, implement and evaluate the health service. For the proper analysis of the collected information a definitive approach must be undertaken. This includes a rigorous comparative study. Comparison of the selected group of population with a larger population, in order to ascertain the health issues and the disease rate. This is followed by the comparative data analysis with the previous year data, identifying significant gaps and identification of the positive features as well as the prevailing alarming health problems in the community (Bretan et al., 2013). In order to identify the significant gaps statistical analysis must be conducted and the portion that must be highlighted on the statistical analysis are: Questioner for Statistical Analysis Number of the affected individuals (chronic illness) Impact of illness on peoples life Evidence or prevalence of appropriate or effective interventions Abundance of the health service or lack in any field Health strategies and priorities Expertise in nursing training available Nature of prevention strategy Taking actions In order to record the action plans a specific table must be maintaine Health Problems to be addressed Objectives Actions to be taken Who will process the objectives Time scale of the mission Evaluation of the measures undertaken Conclusion Conducting a community assessment generally involves collating the list of different problems that needs to solved against the parameters of the recent available resources. All of this can be done by implementing four basic steps that can be simplified into process of collecting and examining data, identification of the problems those have already being addressed, consultation with the professional experts in the health domain, and proper analysis of the existing data. After the successful completion of the community assessment analysis, proper planning and successful implementation of the designed programs need to be done. It is also important to inspire the community to back the initiative of community health assessment this is due to the fact that if a said community gets indulged in the task of protecting the overall health background of its own native people, it generate a powerful drive for changing the health backup. References Barnett, K. (2012). Best practices for community health needs assessment and implementation strategy development: A review of scientific methods, current practices, and future potential.Atlanta, Georgia: The Public Health Institute The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. Bretan, O., Silva, J. E., Ribeiro, O. R., Corrente, J. E. (2013). Risk of falling among elderly persons living in the community: assessment by the Timed up and go test.Brazilian journal of otorhinolaryngology,79(1), 18-21. Clark, M. J. (2015). Community health nursing. Hong, H. Y., Scardamalia, M. (2014). Community knowledge assessment in a knowledge building environment.Computers Education,71, 279-288. McMurray, A., Clendon, J. (2015).Community Health and Wellness-E-book: Primary Health Care in Practice. Elsevier Health Sciences. Morris, J. N., Howard, E. P., Fries, B. E., Berkowitz, R., Goldman, B., David, D. (2014). Using the community health assessment to screen for continued driving.Accident Analysis Prevention,63, 104-110. Pitts, S. B. J., Vu, M. B., Garcia, B. A., McGuirt, J. T., Braxton, D., Hengel, C. E., ... Ammerman, A. S. (2013). A community assessment to inform a multi-level intervention to reduce CVD risk and risk disparities in a rural community.Family community health,36(2), 135. Sampson, G., Gearin, K. J. M., Boe, M. (2015). A rural local health departmenthospital collaborative for a countywide community health assessment.Journal of Public Health Management and Practice,21(1), 23-30.