Community Health Assessment Paper

A community health assessment gives organizations comprehensive information about the community’s current health status, needs, and issues. Following a community health assessment comes the creation of a community health improvement plan. This takes the work of the health assessment, prioritizes the issues most important to the community, then creates goals for improvement and plans for implementation. This information can help develop a community health improvement plan by justifying how and where resources should be allocated to best meet community needs (CDC, 2015). The Public Health Accreditation Board defines a community health improvement plan (CHIP) as a “long-term, systematic effort to address public health problems on the basis of

Although some issues, such as the availability of living wage jobs rose to the top during the exercise, the committee felt “it was important to choose issues that would be more feasible to focus on during this first cycle of community health improvement” (Read, 2012). As such, the first issue will analyze the action plan to improve health care quality and affordability in the county. This is important due to the recent impact of policy reform, such as the Health Care Affordability Act, has had on the region. The next issue will combine the issues of health care access and stress management in order to attack these overlaying simultaneously. Along with the focus on the population’s health, this priority, in part, also provides elements for addressing the problem of job availability and wages; among other issues. Thus, Kittitas County displays how being able to show progress and accomplishments is important to the sustainability of community health improvement projects. Other issues may be considered during annual revisions, depending on progress of the plan. Goals for each strategic issue were then created, and action plans to implement each strategy followed. The aforementioned health priorities will be further analyzed for better understanding, critique,