The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA

Abstract #39092

Mary Kay Anderson, MSN, PhD, Family & Community Nursing, East Tennessee State University, PO Box 70 676, ETSU, Johnson City, TN 37614-0676, 423-439-7169, anderson@etsu.edu

Health assessment skills are now a core element of competencies for Bachelor-prepared nurses, and nurses commonly perform thorough and wholistic exams for their individual clients. However, when the client is a community, it is an enormous challenge to wholistically assess the client’s health. Health status measures are often unavailable, and empirical measures of ‘capacity for change’ or ‘ability to identify and solve its problems’ are lacking for the community client. This paper reports on a recent effort to test such a measure in a neighborhood community within a small city in the Southeastern US. An abbreviated Community Competence Assessment Scale (CCAS) was an essential part of a community health survey administered to 156 of 660 households in the community. Participants were asked to rate the health of their community with 23 items reflecting the domains of community competence, in addition to more traditional queries about family health, disease preventive behaviors, and use of and need for health-related services. The abbreviated CCAS performed well, and participants were able to respond to questions reflecting the health of the neighborhood community. Survey development, implementation, and findings are presented. Results of the survey are currently being used to inform community interventions by nurses as well as interdisciplinary efforts.

Learning Objectives:

• 1. Participants will become familiar with the concept of community competence as a measure of community health.
• 2. Participants will be able to identify household survey items which may reflect community competence as a measure of community health.
• 3. Participants will recognize the importance of tools to wholistically measure a community’s health.

Keywords: Public Health Nursing, Community Health Assessment

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.