Community health assessment is important in assisting communities become healthy.
Although communities are different, there are similarities by which communities mobilize and affect developmental changes. Assessment is one of the common components that collect data and input on community needs and provides a way to produce intended change in the community. There are two common community development approaches, including health planning and community development approaches. The health planning approach is more of a top down approach where public health professionals make important decisions. On the other hand, the community development approach is more of a bottom up approach where community stakeholders make important decisions regarding health programs that directly affect them. This discussion shows that although the community development approach is costly in terms of time and resources, it can lead to better solutions to community health problems compared to health planning through change in behavior and attitudes.
According to the CDC (2010), community development actively involves members of the community regarding the health problems that directly affect them. One of the advantages of this approach is that the data collected are specific to the community and provide useful information about its members. For instance, obesity is one of the problems affecting various communities around the world. Solving the problem using the health planning approach will involve public health professionals creating laws about food sold to the public. However, the legal process is long and time consuming and often encounters resistance from other stakeholders. For example, it is difficult for health professionals to compel soft drink companies to reduce the amount of calories in the products they sell. The same case applies to the fast food restaurants that sell foods with high calorie content.
However, the community development approach on this issue will involve the community making decisions regarding obesity. Since the stakeholders in the community make decisions regarding health issues directly affect them, they will make them develop positive attitudes and behaviors regarding health practices. For instance, community development approach will make community members increase their consciousness about the kinds of foods they eat and adopt healthy lifestyles. The community development programs members avoid high calorie foods, which can achieve better results than fighting business to stop selling high calorie foods to the public. By focusing on the community, community development programs will achieve greater results in changing the attitudes and behaviors of people regarding community health.
According to Kulbok, Thatcher, Park, and Meszaros (2012), community development approach is that it leads to knowledge-based decisions by the community members. This is better than the health based approaches that seem to impose decisions on the community. For instance, the educating people on health eating can make them realize the significance of evaluating their personal health to ensure foods they eat do not interfere with their health. In addition, it will make them balance between the type of foods they eat and their daily routine exercises. This can achieve better results than top down decisions by the health professionals.
In spite of the benefits, community development is affected by various limitations. According to Sage publications (2007), the community development process can be difficult, costly, and time consuming. For instance, community members are often concerned more about their daily challenges and tasks than creating a future vision for the community. In addition, time and other resources are required to mobilize community members to participate in community development. These factors may limit the community development programs.
References
CDC. (2010). Community health assessment and group evaluation (change). Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dch/programs/healthycommunitiesprogram/tools/change/pdf/changeactionguide.pdf.
Kulbok, P., Thatcher, E., Park, E., & Meszaros, P. (2012). Evolving public health nursing roles: focus on community participatory health promotion and prevention. The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 17(2). doi:10.3912/OJIN.Vol17No02Man01.
Sage publications. (2007). The community development process. Retrieved from http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/15523_Chapter_3.pdf.
