Title: What Is planning?
Course: Level 3 - Health Education and Promotion > Section: Planning, implementing and evaluating a health education program

Before you begin planning your health education activities, you need to have a clear understanding of what planning means.

Planning can be defined as a process of making thoughtful and systematic decisions about what and how needs to be done, by whom, and the resources.

Health planning refers to the process of defining community health problems, Identifying needs and resources, establishing priority goals, and setting out the administrative action needed to reach those goals.

Importance of Planning

As a health extension worker, what do you think is the benefit or importance of planning?. A careful planning helps you achieve the following:

- Planning enables you to match your resources to the problem you intend to solve.
- Planning helps you to use resources more efficiently so you can ensure the best use of scarce resources.
- Planning can help avoid duplication of activities. For example, you wouldn't offer health education to households on the same topic at every visit.
- Planning helps you prioritise needs and activities.
- Planning enables you to think about how to develop the best methods with which to solve a problem.