Question

Describe a process for assessing communities and priortizing the needs revealed by community assessment?

Answer 1

Conducting a community assessment – the process:

Establishing assessment team(s):

The first and foremost step of an assessment process is to gather human resources required to conduct effective assessment. This includes the availability of healthcare force, organizations or health systems, community members, etc. It also involves identification of training and other needs of health members so that they can utilize their full potential towards community assessment and plan implementation.

Identifying the resources:

The next step is to find out the technical, financial and other resources required to complete the community project effectively. It involves analysing the financial resources for availability, proposing budget(s) for planning, implementation and evaluation and searching out for the availability of any external funds.

Involving community and other partnerships if available:

As we know that a team effort is much beneficial than an individual one, an organization must not perform itself by solo. It must identify all the possible available partnerships so that they all together can complete the project much effectively. In case of an available partner, an organization should partner with another one to complete a health assessment within a community; however, there may be scenarios where the partnered system might decide to wait for a few months to implement this initiative. Now, the organization should analyse the benefits of collaborating with a partner or not. For example, it may seek another partner to carry out its project or wait for a few months to continue with the existing partner or to move towards the project by solo.

Data collection:

Data may be of two types: 1. Primary data – collected by the organization itself. 2. Secondary data – collected by others. The organization must move forward with the data collected from secondary sources. For example, the project may be based on reducing the number of pulmonary tuberculosis patients in a community. To carry out this project, the organization must collect data related to the number of patients suffered from tuberculosis: patients treated, still hospitalized, partially recovered, completely recovered and died of tuberculosis.

Following data collection, the next step is to categorize the data and analyse it.

Setting health priorities:

All the problems and health issues identified within a community through data collection and analysis are listed out for prioritising them. There are a variety of methods for identifying the most important health needs of a community:

Hanlon Method/Basic Priority Rating System (BPRS) – Steps:

Rate each health problem against specific criteria based on size and magnitude of the health problem, and the effectiveness of interventions

The PEARL test:

Propriety – the suitability of health problem being selected.

Economics – the benefits it serves to us and the community economically

Acceptability – the acceptance of the community for this project.

Resources – the availability of all the resources.

Legality – is the law enables us to carry out this program.

    3. Calculate the prioroty scores:

D = [A + (2 X B)] + C

D = Score for health problem i.e. Priority Score

A = Health issue ranking for size

B = Health issue ranking for seriousness

C = Health issue ranking for effectiveness of intervention

4. Finally, rank the health problem - Give ranks to each health problems based on the above formula to identify its priority.

The other methods are:

Dot voting method – (the team members are required to give votes for the health problem they find pressing)

Weighted voting method - (the individual members will rank the health issues from 1 to 5; a combination of these voting’s will determine the priority needs of the community)

Consensus decision method - (group discussion with team members for prioritising a problem)

Moreover, in this process, a SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threat) analysis should also be carried out to identify the probability of success rates of this team effort.

Setting goals, plan strategies and implement the plan:

After finding the most important pressing health problem, the next step is to formulate the health goals of the community. Following this, the organization must find the suitable ways to implement the steps. For example, one community might lack accessibility to health institutions for them conducting more health camps may be useful whereas another community might purely require mass communication/education of health-related information alone.

The implementation is a crucial to the process. There may be a lot of problems occur, say human problems, process problems, structure problems and institutional problems, etc. These are all also analysed and necessary actions/steps to be carried to reach the target. The last step is the evaluation. Here the effectiveness of the program/project is researched and the learnings and the feedback is taken to the next projec