Identifying community health needs

As you prepare to complete this assessment, you may want to think about other related issues to deepen your understanding or broaden your viewpoint. You are encouraged to consider the questions below and discuss them with a fellow learner, a work associate, an interested friend, or a member of your professional community. Note that these questions are for your own development and exploration and do not need to be completed or submitted as part of your assessment.

This assessment will be based around obtaining and reviewing community and public health data in order to determine a health need that should be addressed. The focus will be on how you use data to determine health care concerns, communities, and populations to proactively treat. Think about experiences you may have had working with data, as well as community and population health roles.

What community, city, or state are you planning to use as the setting for your assessment?
Where can you obtain population and community health data for this setting?
How will you obtain data?
What are the different populations in your chosen setting? (Think about cultural, economic, racial, and spiritual perspectives.)
How are the needs of the diverse populations in your setting similar and different?
What are some of the most critical health care needs of your chosen setting?
Are any specific populations more impacted by these needs than others?
What are the basic concepts of health promotion and disease prevention?
How might the populations in your chosen setting be best impacted in a positive way by specific health promotion and disease prevention approaches?
How could you apply specific health promotion and disease prevention strategies to drive improvements related to a specific health care need?
What factors are most likely to affect health promotion and wellness for vulnerable and diverse populations?
How does interpersonal collaboration between health care professionals advance health promotion with the vulnerable and diverse populations?
Scenario

The organization in which you practice is embarking on a new project to better understand the health care needs of the various populations in the community that it serves. You have been asked to join the project to represent your nursing role group. In the first stage of the project, you have been asked to examine community and state demographics to start identifying patterns and trends that can help inform health care practices and improve quality patient outcomes. It has been suggested that the project team begin by searching out relevant government agencies and resources that will help you locate the demographics for either your community or your state. Specifically, you have been asked to look for information regarding demographic makeup, including ethnicity and levels of illness and health status.

It has been noted that many of these resources should be freely available online.

Instructions

As you examine the information that you are collecting, identify a health care need that is currently a concern in your community or state. For example, perhaps you find that your state has one of the highest rates of heart disease in the nation. Once you have identified the health care need in your community, do further exploration to see whether certain groups or populations within your diverse community or state are impacted by this health care need more than others. In our example, elderly and Native American populations are two groups that have a higher prevalence of heart disease.

Appropriately identifying the highly impacted subgroups within your community or state is a key component of this assessment, as you will continue to reference these groups for the upcoming assessments as well.

For this assessment you will develop a concise but comprehensive report of the demographic makeup of the community you have decided to focus upon, as well as the most significant health concerns. Be sure you are linking the health concerns you are identifying to specific demographic groups within your chosen community. The bullet points below correspond to the grading criteria in the scoring guide. Be sure that your submission addresses all of them. You may also want to read the Identifying Community Health Needs Scoring Guide to better understand how each grading criterion will be assessed.

In your report, make sure to complete the following:

Describe demographic characteristics for your community or state in terms of demographic makeup, ethnicity, and illness and health status.
Identify any patterns or trends regarding populations seen in demographic reports.
Identify groups within the community or state population that are highly impacted by the identified health concern.
Communicate community demographic data and health needs in a manner that is clear and understandable to a variety of potential audiences.
Integrate relevant sources to support assertions, correctly formatting citations and references using current APA style.
Additional Requirements
Length of submission: 2–4 typed, double-spaced pages, not including the title and reference pages. Your report should be thorough, but concise. No abstract is required for this assessment.
Number of references: Cite a minimum of 3–5 sources of scholarly or professional evidence that illustrate the demographic make up of your chosen community, as well as its specific health care needs. Resources should be no more than five years old.
APA formatting: Use the APA Style Paper Tutorial [DOCX] to help you in writing and formatting your analysis.

THE AREA THAT NEEDS TO BE USED FOR THE PAPER IS THE ADIRONDACK REGION OF NORTHERN NEW YORK STATE!