DATA SOURCES2 Community Health Assessment Community health assessment is essential since it assists in providing a snapshot of local systems, environmental changes, and systems that are in place and in the identification of health areas that require improvement. The collected data when assessing community health also helps in the formulation of health strategies that aim at making sustainable and positive changes. The two major categories of data used in carrying out assessment of community health are; primary sources and secondary sources. Primary data Primarydataisthemostusedwhenconductingahealthassessmentofagiven community. Primary data is collected directly from the people within the community. There are four main categories of primary data that are used during the health assessment. They are community forums, focus groups, community surveys and key informant interviews (Dattalo, Wise, Ford Ii, Abramson & Mahoney, 2017). Although all these categories of primary data have their weaknesses and strengths, community surveys have proved to be more effective in terms of reliability, validity, and repeatability as compared to others. Hence, community surveys are effective when conducting estimation since they are performed from a representative sample of a given population (Drake, Rancilio & Stafford, 2017). Secondary data Secondary data involves the usage of data that has been collected by someone else other than the user. Researchers who use secondary data in carrying out a health assessment of a community should try to use the most recent available data. Secondary data can be retrieved
DATA SOURCES3 from local, national, state, and regional sources. Some of the types of secondary data include health status data, population data, and health status data (Kahn et al, 2016).
DATA SOURCES4 References Dattalo, M., Wise, M., Ford Ii, J. H., Abramson, B., & Mahoney, J. (2017). Essential resources for implementation and sustainability of evidence-based health promotion programs: a mixed methods multi-site case study.Journal of community health,42(2), 358-368. Drake, B. F., Rancilio, D. M., & Stafford, J. D. (2017). Research methods. InPublic Health Research Methods for Partnerships and Practice(pp. 174-187). Routledge. Kahn, M. G., Callahan, T. J., Barnard, J., Bauck, A. E., Brown, J., Davidson, B. N., ... & Liaw, S. T. (2016). A harmonized data quality assessment terminology and framework for the secondary use of electronic health record data.Egems,4(1).