This article provides a sample solution for Community Needs Assessment paper example for an African American Community Living in Montgomery County, Alabama.
Describes the four types of needs and compares them. Explains the interaction of the four types and the role of each type of need in the community assessment process.
Selects one of the four needs and provides an example of how this need can be applied to a health issue in your community. Describes the potential pitfalls of focusing a community needs assessment on a single need. Provides examples to support your assertions.Community Health Assessment Paper Example
Sample Solution for Community Health Assessment Paper
Community Needs Assessment for an African American Community Living in Montgomery County, Alabama.
Introduction
There are gaps between the existing services in a community and what should exist. The categorization of these gaps may be of essence based on the four types of needs in the community. Although the needs may vary between different communities, the type of assessment depends on targeted goals to be achieved, the current needs, and the available resources for the assessment process. The needs assessment would, for example, be focused on identifying the community assets and determine the potential concerns faced by the community. A community’s needs can be estimated by questioning the residents of their opinions about services provided and developed within the community. These opinions can be used to build an agenda aimed at having a change in the community. This paper explores the types of needs in a community assessment process and the steps followed in needs assessment using Bradshaw’s taxonomy of community needs.
Types of Community Needs According to Different Scholars
The concept of need in public health is significant since its application facilitates appropriate planning and management of healthcare services about resource allocation, equity, and health improvement. The needs concept is a multi-faceted concept with no particular definition as the universal one. Most importantly, ideologies of need can serve as a method to identify needs irrespective of whether one uses a person-centered or policy-focused approach. For example, according to Abraham Maslow (1954), human needs can be categorized into five groups in a hierarchy of ascending order of prepotency and probability of appearance. Within this concept at the bottom of the pyramid are physiological needs like food, sleep, and activity. Above the physiological needs are safety needs like protection from harm followed by love and belonging needs like love, friendship, and companionship. Next are esteem needs where the individual concerns self-respect, autonomy, and personal worth, and at the peak of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is self-actualization. In the early 1970s, Harvey, on the other hand, used a policy centered approach and classified the nine areas of needs as food, housing, medical care, and education. Other groups are consumer goods, recreation, neighborhood amenities, transport infrastructure, and social and environmental services. The two definitions are mainly functional and offer a loose boundary of what may be regarded as need, making it difficult to distinguish the needy from the no-need community or group.
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Bradshaw Taxonomy of Need of 1972
Due to the other two models’ ambiguity in differentiating the needy versus the no- need group. J. Bradshaw developed the taxonomy of need in a proposal that delineates social needs into four categories: normative needs, perceived needs, expressed needs, and relative needs (Bradshaw, 1972). In Bradshaw’s taxonomy of needs, the normative need at the community or social level is professionally defined and knows. Besides having a desirable standard set by social scientists, professionals, or policymakers, a baseline standard is used for comparison with those below it being said to require both support and special services. An example includes the Healthy People 2020 objectives.
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The second social need is felt or perceived need that considers a felt need as what community members want. It is defined by enquiring from the service users what they wish to have meant more often than not the perceived need can be inflated or deflated by the ignorance (Bradshaw, 1972). For example, users mention their high expectations of the housing unit. Next is expressed need, which refers to the equivalent of demand or unmet need (Bradshaw, 1972). Under this need, there exists a notion that one does not make a demand unless one feels the need. Ideally, the policymaker posits that no demand means no need. Examples of expressed needs like the need for better education services. The fourth and last of the social needs is comparative or relative need whereby the need is measured about a user already receiving the service in context (Bradshaw, 1972). As such, the user is in comparative need if they have the same or worse characteristics as someone receiving the service. An example is where District A is compared to District B, which is offering a free medical treatment while the former does not.
Normative Need and Its Application to T2DM in African American Community Living in Montgomery County, Alabama
Studies indicate that African American males are arguably the most highly stigmatized and stigmatized group in the US (Hood et al., 2017). Phillips et al. (2018) opine that there is a need for young African Americans to develop leadership roles as part of the Center for Healthy African Males through Partnerships. Despite these facts, the current community assessment identifies leadership as the normative need for both males and females. By nurturing the community concepts of participation, programs addressing the risk-taking behaviors among African-American males are addressed. The unimodal community assessment process recognized the absence of both genders’ parental presence on the Homefront, leading to the youth’s subsequent normative need to take on leadership roles. The normative need was identified as a result of the youth’s anger and inadequate numbers of licensed counselors to resolve the mental health issues that act as barriers to the black youth being successful leaders in healthcare and wellbeing. The parents highlight the need for social support from the individual to the family and community level with positive role models who increase respect and self-esteem. Concerning T2DM treatment and management, the young black African leader is both males and females. Deloitte Devolvement (2016) observes healthcare leaders at the community level utilize multi-faceted approaches to initiate strategies that are better in managing T2DM. Through the strategy, retail clinics increase their services menu by incorporating customer health screenings through foot exams, blood pressure, glucose biometric screenings, and hemoglobin A1C and weight monitoring. Other measures include patient engagement and screening for and subsequent treatment of depression.
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Potential Pitfalls of Using Unimodal over Multimodal Needs Assessment
Several data collection techniques are at the disposal of the individual conduction, a community needs assessment. These techniques include using the critical informant approach, the public forum approach, the survey approach, the Delphi technique, and the nominal group process technique. Therefore, the researcher can adopt a unimodal approach where only of the techniques are used or use a combination of more than one method, hence the term multimodal approach (WHO, 2001). A significant disadvantage of using the unimodal system to conduct the community needs assessment among the African American community is that it reduces the community assessment’s accuracy. For example, relying on the critical informant approach has the disadvantage of having a biased perspective (Shea et al., 2012). The advantages of using a multimodal approach to assess all the four levels of the community’s social needs, like combining the evidence obtained formal the four types of needs is lost. The unimodal approach to Bradshaw’s taxonomy of needs relies heavily on the source of information (Bradshaw, 1972). The single-source approach also lacks the invariant representation since the data collected must be relatively invariant to the identified normative need.
Basic Steps of Conducting a Needs Assessment
Once an individual is conversant with the various approaches used to define and classify the types of community needs and settled on Bradshaw’s Taxonomy of needs, what follows is an outline of the steps one should follow in conducting their community needs assessment (Cuiccio & Husby-Slater, 2018). Step 1 commences with the definition of one’s community as doing so accords one the sense of why gaps may exist. A concise definition also gives a glimpse of the groups and subgroups that feel the effects most.
Given these, the community is defined in terms of its population, place, attitudes, and values. Step two entails deciding on the community needs assessment scope considering that these needs are usually interconnected and complicated. For example, being homeless has many underlying causes of’ effects on one’s health and wellbeing. Step three then follows with the identification of the community’s assessment. The term assessment embraces all resources available in the community that would make the identified program a success. Step four comprises making the right connections with people stating with students to the top political leaders like the State governor and mayor of the city.
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Data collection follows at step five, where once includes the relevant statistics reinforced with the community members’ thoughts and knowledge. Combining the data enables one to determine whether the need is perceived or relative and streamline the proposed program accordingly. Methods used to collect the data include interviews, having listening sessions in public and participatory observation. Likewise, one can use existing quantitative data sources from the US census, Public health data, and other credible sources. Step sic then has the findings analyzed in terms of strengths, gaps, challenges, and opportunities. Only then will the person conducting the community needs assessment be advised to prioritize the community needs and implement the proposed initiative.
Additional Steps That Should Be Considered In the Assessment Process
Once the program has been implemented, other steps include evaluating the program to determine its effectiveness and feasibility. Depending on the findings, the change agent should decide whether o revise, sustain, or abandon the program. If successful, the last step entails having the research present their findings were the exhaustively address issues like the key players, methodology participation, and the strengths and limitations of the needs assessment and its results. Also included in the reported to be disseminated are the key findings, recommendations, and the next steps premised on the said findings.
Conclusion
A community needs assessment should only be conducted after a thorough understanding of community needs and the best approach to categorize them. The Bradshaw Taxonomy of needs addresses the shortcomings of Maslow’s and Harvey’s categorization. Once chosen, the four needs are grouped as either normative, perceived, expressed, or relative needs. Additionally, the researcher should adopt a multimodal approach to conduct instead of the unimodal system to establish community needs. Finally, the researcher must adhere to the main steps of facilitating a community needs assessment and be ready to disseminate their findings after the successful implementation of a program to address the identified public health issue.
References
Bradshaw, J. (1972). Taxonomy of social need. Problems and progress in medical care: essays on current research, 7th series, 70-82.
Cuiccio, C., & Husby-Slater, M. (2018). Needs Assessment Guidebook: Supporting the Development of District and School Needs Assessments. State Support Network.
Deloitte Development (2016) Turning the tide on diabetes management How leaders in health care are using multi-faceted approaches, URL: Turning the tide on diabetes management How leaders in health care are using multi-faceted approaches Accessed on 27th August 2020.
Hood, S., Golembiewski, E., Benbow, K., Sow, H., & Sanders Thompson, V. (2017). Whom can I turn to? Emotional support availability in African American social networks. Social Sciences, 6(3), 104.
Medeiros-Ferreira, L., Navarro-Pastor, J. B., Zúñiga-Lagares, A., Romaní, R., Muray, E., & Obiols, J. E. (2016). Perceived needs and health-related quality of life in people with schizophrenia and metabolic syndrome: a “real-world” study. BMC psychiatry, 16(1), 1-9.
Phillips, J. M., Branch, C. J., Brady, S. S., & Simpson, T. (2018). Parents speak a needs assessment for community programming for Black male youth—American journal of preventive medicine, 55(5), S82-S87.
Shea, J., Santos, M. J. J., & Byrnes, P. (2012). The community needs assessment and data-supported decision making: Keys to building responsive and effective health centers. Natl. Assoc. Community Heal. Centers.
World Health Organization. (2001). Community Health Needs Assessment: An introductory guide for the family health nurse in Europe (No. EUR/01/5019306). Copenhagen: WHO Regional Office for Europe.
Question
- Describes the four types of needs and compares them. Explains the interaction of the four types and the role of each type of need in the community assessment process.
- Selects one of the four needs and provides an example of how this need can be applied to a health issue in your community. Describes the potential pitfalls of focusing a needs assessment on a single need. Provides examples to support your assertions.
- Identifies and describes the basic steps of conducting a needs assessment and also explains the importance of each.
- Describes any additional steps that should be considered in the assessment process.
