Chapter Six: Community Health Assessment and Evaluation
Chapter Six: Community Health Assessment and Evaluation
Overview
The purpose of this chapter is to review two community health assessment tools that can be used to perform a community assessment. Community assessments can help nurses identify community needs, examine elements of the environment where their patients live and work, and provide the data necessary to develop an effective plan for intervention or health promotion.
Learning Objectives
- Understand the purpose of performing a community assessment
- Identify two commonly used frameworks for conducting a community assessment
- Apply different approaches to conduct an assessment (community, population, setting-specific, problem-focused)
- Evaluate quantitative and qualitative data that can be used in the community assessment
Key Terms
- community health assessment
- windshield survey
- walking survey
- quantitative data
- qualitative data
Introduction
Community assessment is a fundamental skill for community and public health nurses. Assessment frameworks are used to identify problems. Nurses and communities work collaboratively to design and implement strategies to alleviate problems as seen and experienced by the community members. Community health frameworks include the evaluation of programs.
Community Health Assessment
A community health assessment, also known as community health needs assessment, refers to a state, tribal, local, or territorial health assessment that identifies key health needs and issues through systematic, comprehensive data collection and analysis. In many ways, community health assessments are similar to patient assessments. As with the nursing process, the first step is assessment. The community health assessment identifies critical health needs and issues through systematic, comprehensive data collection and analysis. This assessment provides organizations with comprehensive information about the community’s current health status, needs, and issues. This information can help health professionals to develop a community health improvement plan by justifying how and where resources should be allocated to best meet community needs (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2018).
Frameworks
Content in this section was adapted from the “Community Planning for Health Assessment: Frameworks & Tools” from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2024).
Most community health assessment and planning frameworks include steps or phases similar to those of the nursing process, commonly referred to as ADPIE: assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation, and evaluation. The first four steps of community health assessment and planning frameworks—organize and plan, engage, develop, and conduct—align with the assessment itself: prioritizing the health issues is the diagnosis, developing the community health plan is the planning aspect of the process, and then implementing and evaluating (Table 6.1).
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Community Health Assessment Framework |
The Nursing Process