Community assessment for health

Overview Many health services are aware of who is walking in the door, but do not know who is not-in other words, they do not know who is not using their services or why. Understanding the community, together with identifying health issues and resources, is a prerequisite for planning effective community health services. Community assessment provides evidence for planning, effective program planning, implementation and evaluation. This chapter introduces the first of these stages, community assessment, and overviews techniques that are used: community profiling and needs analysis. The steps necessary to carry out community profiling and needs analyses, and the relationships between community assessment approaches, are discussed. Objectives When you have read this chapter, you should be able to: discuss why community practice should be informed by evidence; differentiate between community profiling and needs analysis; plan a community assessment, including: - gathering existing data; - consulting with the community; - identifying parameters on which data should be collected; analyse community assessment data; identify sources of information about the socio-economic and health status of a community.