Health promotion programs aim to improve the health of members of a community via strategies including education sessions, skills development, provision of support services and empowerment of individuals. The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion states that strong community involvement is an important pre-requisite of health promotion program success.
Community Needs Analysis – First Step in Planning a Health Promotion Program
For a community health worker, the first step towards a health promotion intervention is undertaking a community needs analysis. The benefits of completing the community needs analysis include gaining an understanding of the issues that the community feel are important and an early chance to gain the support of the community for the proposed intervention.
Defining Need In Community
Commonly four types of need are expressed in community health:
- Normative need – which is expert based pronouncements such as BMI levels;
- Expressed need – based on observations by the community health worker relating to areas such as current service use;
- Comparative need – comparing the services provided in one community against a benchmark other community; and
- Felt need – the problems that the community members consider as the most important health issues; these may not be the same as any of the expert assessed needs.
Community Consultation and Data Collection
In the initial planning of a community needs analysis, time must be spent consulting with the community. This can be done through surveys, focus groups or public meetings and has a twofold benefit of gathering information in relation to the felt need of the community and obtaining community support for proposed health promotion interventions.
Other data collection required to paint a picture of the current health status of the community and its potential needs include reviewing statistical data for demographic trends and reviewing the documentation relating to any previous community needs analyses or health promotion programs that have been undertaken in the community.
Health Promotion Program Priorities
After the community consultation and data collection phase, the results should be presented to the community for feedback and assistance in determining health promotion program priorities. In order to be successful, a health promotion program must be owned by the community members not the health workers.
Factors to consider when determining priorities include the prevalence and severity of the health issue and whether it is likely to be assisted by the implementation of a health promotion intervention.
Evidence Based Practice – Literature Review and Target Group Description
After determining the health promotion program priority, the next step in undertaking a community needs analysis is to review the evidence base of risk factors and interventions.
Describing the target group is another important factor in planning a health promotion program. Target group definition enables all people associated with the program to understand who the program is aimed at and will be used when the program is subjected to process evaluation.
At this stage in the community needs analysis, additional data relating to the specific health problem’s risk factors needs to be obtained from the community.
Analysis of Results and Design of Health Promotion Program
After gathering the data and evidence based practice resources, an analysis can be undertaken to determine the causal pathways that lead to the health issue. The causal pathways may provide a blueprint for the design of the health promotion program.
When beginning the design of the health promotion program, review the work of current services in the community to see if there are gaps and involve these services in the design of the health promotion program.
Undertaking a community needs analysis is the first step in designing a health promotion program. It is important to obtain community engagement in any health promotion program and the community needs analysis provides an opportunity to obtain engagement prior to the implementation of the health promotion program.
Tracey Lloyd - Based in Australia, Tracey Lloyd is experienced in management & strategic development of community projects and non-profit ...
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