The Importance Of Public Health Assessment

In the United States, community health field is anchored in the history of innovations of public health methods and programs aids at reducing risk factor prevalence, decreasing acute and chronic disease burden and injury occurrence, and promoting health (Goodman, Bunnel, Posner, 2014). “Community Health refers to the health status of a defined group of people and the actions and conditions, both private and public (governmental), to promote, protect, and preserve their health” (McKenzie et al., 2005).

Personal health is all about body needs, requirements and limitations so that avoidable health difficulties can be prevented. Basically the major difference between two are that community health is about a group of people and personal health

Many government health agencies conducts these assessments for assuring the safety of public. Agency for toxic substances and disease registry conducts public health assessments for the purpose of determining the extent of exposure of harmful substances. The benefits of the public health assessment is that it helps in planning for the future health needs of the public by developing policy and other proper planning (CDC, 2005).

Collecting data and proper information some major steps in assessment process and so conflicts will arise if the proper data is not collected. One of the example where error occurred was a 2005 report of Turkey. This report had no information on how the researchers selected their village sample, and so as a result, its findings ' broad applicability was difficult for the assessment process. Because of these problem the question of reliability arises as these assessments are important for strengthening government system (CDC,

Community health assessments are conducted for assessing the health needs and usually provide information for problem and asset identification and policy formulation, implementation, and evaluation. Community Health Assessment also helps to measure the problems and provide assurance function of public health system as it helps to strengthen the whole system itself (NACCHO, n.d.).

A Community Health Assessment is an integral part in community health improvement process. Because this community health improvement process uses Community Health Assessment data to identify priority issues, develop and implement strategies for action, and establish accountability to ensure measurable health improvement, through the form of planning known as community health improvement plan. These improvement processes goes and looks beyond the performance of organization which serves some part of a community and the activities of that specific community contribute to community health improvement (NACCHO,