Approaches for implementation and updation of community health needs assessment: an updated review

Abstract

Implementation of assessment is utmost significant to enhance the prospects and strengths of Community Health Needs. Addressing community health needs has been a challenge for the Governments of various nations in the world due to various reasons like rising number of recipients, insufficient resources, increase in demands of resources and discrimination in their supply. The role of community health assessment is central in enabling practitioners, managers and policy makers to identify, categorize and prioritize demands, update the policies and then, to ensure that these health care resources are supplied to optimize health care and maximize its outreach to community members. It has a great potential to be a vital tool which can empower the management and planning of health care across the countries at the level of nationwide, state-wide and district wide communities, populations and families. The objective of this review article is to present the systematic and updated approaches to implement community health needs assessment at multiple levels i.e. district, state and national, keeping those aligned with the approaches indicated within global policies. It’s measurable outcomes are to identify and list the priority health needs, target resources to address inequalities, involve local people, educate and train the stakeholders and provide evidence based updated data for amending existing policies. The process of undertaking community health needs assessment and the importance of contribution of health care personnel in this process is also included here.