Title: Steps in community health information need assessment
Course: Level 3 - Health Education and Promotion > Section: Health education need assessment

To perform community need assessment in your area, you need to follow certain steps to identify the problem accurately. This need assessment encompasses a process of data collection and analysis.

There are some essential steps involved in assessing community health information needs.

1. Getting Started
At this stage, you need to identify the population to be assessed, rational of assessment and community members to be involved.At the end of this stage, you should be clear about the population you are working with and clarified the aim of assessment and its boundary.
2. Identifying Health Priorities
This phase involves serious data collection and analysis. Using the collected data you will identify major determinants of the gap occurred and developed general description of the problems. Based on this profile, you will be able to prioritise them regarding their changeability and importance. (You will learn about prioritisation of problem in Session 6 of this module). At the end of this stage, you will have a short list of factors that hinder access to health information and their priority regarding changeability and importance.
3. Assessing a Health Priority for Action
This stage encompasses what changes can you make that will have a positive impact on significant issues affecting the identified factor. At the end of this stage, you will have actions used to reduce the gap and which are acceptable and cost-effective.
4. Planning Action
Now you have worked out what changes you want to make to tackle your choose priority problem. The major task of this stage is developing agreed aims, objectives, and targets. At the end of this stage, you will be ready to implement your action plan.
5. Program Review/Monitoring and Evaluation
This is the final stage of health information need assessment. At this stage, you will check your achievement against original aims and objectives. You will also assess the opportunities and challenges of your course of action. At the end, you should transfer lesson learned from the program to other programs.To successfully assess the need of certain community following the above five stage is important. To support program development, team working, community involvement, data collection and analysis skills are important.

Fig 5.1. Steps to be followed during the need assessment