Health Needs Assessment

A Community Health Needs Health (CHNA) is a process designed to identify health issues within a community, recognize the neediest, ensure the accessibility of health care resources, and ensure the good use of those resources. The ultimate goal of a community health needs assessment is to promote community healthcare by identifying and prioritizing health needs, knowing the available resources, and proposing an adequate action plan to address needs (Pennel, McLeroy, Burdine, Matarrita-Cascante, 2015). However, the assessment method is different form one researcher to another. In fact the best community health needs assessment approach remains unknown (Becker, 2015). However, there are many critics among the scientific community on the quality of some approaches. The lack of research on the best assessment approach, and the data collection method are some of the problems related to the assessment. A lack of research on the best practices to conduct a community health needs assessment remains one of the issues in public health (Becker, 2015). As a result, the health needs assessment approach differs from one nonprofit hospital to another.

However, they are many concerns on the assessment approach. The first one is about a lack of research on the best assessment method. The second problem is relation to how the data are collected during the assessment. Using only quantitative data to determine community health needs without a combination of qualitative data remains problematic. It is considered crucial to include the voices of the community during the assessment process. Using the best approach to determine the most pressing community health issues and implementing sustainable strategies to address the identified needs should be a priority for every country around the