Oral

The purpose of this session is to introduce the audience to community health assessment practice and describe the challenges it presents. Community assessment practitioners review secondary data, collect primary data, gather feedback from communities, identify gaps, strengths and needs, develop and implement strategic plans toward improving health outcomes. Performance standards would be helpful in increasing practitioner’s abilities to compare and evaluate community assessments. In addition, the increasing diversity in communities throughout the US, challenges community assessment projects are challenged to collect sufficient and accurate information regarding the health status and needs of all subgroups within state populations. Strategies need to be developed for community health assessments, to appropriately identify and obtain valid and reliable information from population subgroups within diverse communities, as well as testing methods to assess health needs in hard-to-reach population subgroup. Not only will these challenges be presented by active solutions from different regions of the United States will be discussed.

Session Objectives: • Describe steps in establishing definitions, performance standards, and benchmarks for community health assessment practice • List at least three research questions that could advance the understanding of community health assessment practice • Describe a methodology for evaluating the impact of community health assessments. • Describe the challenges of gathering valid and representative health data from hard-to-reach population subgroups in community health assessment efforts

CE Credits: CME, Health Education (CHES), Nursing