Title: Concept of need assessment
Course: Level 3 - Health Education and Promotion > Section: Health education need assessment

Before implementing successful health education and promotion activities felt needs/real need of the community should be assessed and identified. There is no use making an effort conducting health education on issues that are not relevant for your local community because your activities will be wasted.

Before involving any individual or group within your community in health education activities you should try and discover the felt needs of the community.

Oxford dictionary defines need assessment as "A systematic process to acquire an accurate, thorough picture of a system's strengths and weaknesses, in order to improve it and meet existing and future challenges."

The health needs of individual patients coming to take health service may not reflect the wider health needs of the community. Distinguishing between individual needs and the wider needs of the community is important in the planning and provision of local health education program. If you ignore this issue few people will perceives the needs of population rather than what actually exist in the community.

Health needs assessment is the systematic approach to ensuring that the health service uses its resources to improve the health of the population in the most efficient way. It involves describing health problems of a population; identify inequalities in health and access to services; and determine priorities for the most effective use of resources. You should able to identify, prioritize and select health education and promotion.

A needs assessment is a systematic process for determining and addressing needs, or "gaps" between current conditions and desired conditions or "wants".

The discrepancy between the current condition and wanted condition must be measured to appropriately identify the need. The need can be a desire to improve current performance or to correct a deficiency

It can be an effective tool to clarify problems and identify appropriate interventions or solutions. By clearly identifying the problem, finite resources can be directed towards developing and implementing a feasible and applicable solution. Gathering appropriate and sufficient data informs the process of developing an effective product that will address the groups' needs and wants.For example think about that you want to raise awareness on HIV/AIDS in your local secondary school; your health education session might be wasted unless you identify what it is that the students want to learn.

- Think about harmful traditional practice that may be practiced in your Kebele. If you start health education without doing need assessment, you may waste your time and energy on problem that didn't need an intervention.
- However, if you conducted a health assessment and found that early marriage is very common. You know that early marriage is a harmful traditional practice and want to change this. To change people's perceptions and prevent this practice happening in the future is a complex issue - where do you start?
- The Health Extension practitioner should ideally try to understand the culture of the community and introduce new ideas. Using opposing statements that may be contrary to existing local beliefs, culture and practices of your community should be avoided. You can also involve different respected people to enforce expected change.

Health education is best implemented after the real needs of the community have been assessed and identified. A Needs Assessment is different from a list of needs. A Needs Assessment draws linkages from identification of a problem to proposed resolution. So we conduct need assessment because it:-

- Provide evidence about a population on which to plan health education program
- Provides an opportunity to engage specific populations and enable them to contribute in planning and resource mobilization.
- Provides an opportunity for cross-sectoral partnership working with local and religious leaders and effective interventions
- Helps you in determine priorities for the most effective use of resource

While doing need assessment you will strengthen community involvement in decision making, improve sill of working with community, develop your experience and develop good communication skill.