Question

Discuss why a needs assessment is so critical to planning a health promotion program. Provide and support at least three reasons.

Answer 1

A new term to characterize the creation and improvement of well-established approaches to identifying the needs of a local community is health needs assessment. The first health care officers in the 19th century were responsible for determining the needs of their local communities.

Although public health practitioners have historically carried out health needs assessments looking at their local community, these local health needs should be central to all health professionals. In order to address the needs of their local communities, hospitals and primary care teams should both aim to improve programmes. Combining the estimation of population needs with intimate awareness of patients needs may help to meet this goal

· The comprehensive approach to ensuring that the health service uses its services to improve the health of the community in the most successful way is the evaluation of health needs.

· • Includes epidemiological, qualitative and comparative approaches to explain community health problems; identify health inequalities and access to services; and establish goals for the most efficient use of resources

· Health needs are those that may benefit from health care or broader improvements in culture and the environment.

· • Effective evaluation of health needs requires a realistic understanding of what is involved, the time and resources needed to perform evaluations and appropriate incorporation of the findings into the planning and commissioning of local services

The health-care costs are increasing. Over the past 30 years, healthcare spending has risen even more quickly than the cost increases recorded in other economic sectors, and healthcare is now one of the largest sectors in most developed countries. Medical developments and demographic trends will continue to exert rising cost pressure.

At the same time, the available resources for healthcare are minimal. Many individuals have disproportionate access to affordable health care, and many governments are unable to uniformly offer such care. Furthermore there is a significant difference in the provision and utilisation of health services by geographic region and point of supply. Availability appears to be inversely correlated to the needs of the serving population.

Consumerism is another catalyst for change. The aspirations of members of the public have led, from access and fairness to adequacy and efficacy, to greater questions about the quality of the services they receive.

In both developed and developing countries, these factors have prompted health care changes. These changes led to the separation of responsibility for funding health care from its provision in Britain and the creation of a buying role for health authorities and general practitioners.

Health authorities had greater opportunities to try to tailor local services to their own populations, and the 1990 National Health Service Act required health authorities to assess their populations' health needs and use those assessments to set priorities for improving their local population's health. More recent work on inequality in health has confirmed this, suggesting that Health authorities should perform "equity audits" to assess if health-care services are being used as required.

At the primary care stage, general practitioners have become more integral to strategic planning and health service creation through fundholding, local commissioning, and complete purchasing initiatives. With this increased commissioning authority, patients and policymakers have increased expectations that decision-making would represent local and national priorities, encourage quality, support the equitable care on the basis of need. The Labor Government has committed itself to "need and need alone" ensuring access to healthcare, and the main roles of primary care organisations will be to prepare, commission and track local health facilities to meet defined local needs.

For individual practices and health professionals, health needs assessment provides the opportunity for:

· Definition of disease trends within the local population and deviations from trends of district, regional , or national disease;

· Learn more about their patients' needs and preferences, and the local population;

· Highlighting areas of unmet need and a specific set of goals to be worked towards in order to address those needs;

· Deciding rationally how to use resources in the most effective and productive way to improve the wellbeing of their local populations;

· Policy influencing, interagency cooperation, or goals for research and development.