Before you plan any public health program, you must determine the needs of the community through a needs assessment. The needs assessment is the "most critical step in the planning process" (McKenzie et al., 2017 With this step you can target your public health program to exactly what is needed, not just what someone guessed would be helpful.
This week, you prepare a needs assessment for your community. For your needs assessment, interview two community members (in addition to yourself) to help gauge the "pulse" of the community, what residents want to change, and how the community members see their own health.
Remember that that you are part of the community as well, and your own qualitative observations and opinions as a student of public health are also important.
To Prepare for this Assignment:
• Review Chapter 6 of the Doyle text and Chapter 4 of the McKenzie text.
• Review the data collection methods in Chapter 4 of the McKenzie text.
• Conduct a brief qualitative needs analysis of your community. Using the questions provided below, interview two members of your community about the perceived public health needs. Consider the barriers to addressing significant public health issues within the community and think about resources available that might help to address them:
• How long have you lived in your community?
• What do you believe are the greatest health issues that exist within your community and who are the populations you believe are most impacted by these health issues?
• What are two barriers that exist within your community that you feel could negatively influence these health issues (e.g., no public parks, pollution from a particular factory, no major hospitals or grocery stores)?
• Why do you think those barriers exist?
• What kinds of resources exist within your community that could help influence the health of individuals within your community (i.e., hospitals, community clinics, non-profits, etc.)?
• Consider the resources available within the community to help address the public health issues.
The Assignment (3-4 pages)
• A brief explanation of the data collection methods you selected.
• A brief description of the members of the community that you interviewed.
• Describe the data collected from your interviews. Be sure to explain the perceived public health needs of the community.
• Explain what resources are available within the community.
• Explain how you might address the needs within the community. Be sure to describe how you will utilize resources and address the barriers within the community.
Your written Assignments must follow APA guidelines.
Be sure to support your work with specific citations from this week's Learning Resources and additional scholarly sources as appropriate.