A Web-based tool for assessing and improving the usefulness of community health assessments.

BACKGROUND: Little information is available on characteristics of successful and unsuccessful community health assessment (CHA) reports. METHODS: A consensus process identified criteria for assessing CHA success from a literature review, analysis of CHAs on the Internet, and consultation with experts. Criteria were then turned into questionnaire items. Using these items, a Web-based tool was developed to gather responses from 110 users and potential users about the strengths and weaknesses of CHAs from six New York counties and three from other states. FINDINGS: Respondents tended to rate CHAs positively, with high scores for including important aspects of health, using consistent formats, reproducibility by photocopy, and supporting grant applications. Community health assessments were given low scores because of a lack of focus on positive characteristics and documentation of methods, and failure to indicate relationships among indicators, include narrative and graphics, and be similar to other community planning tools in use. CONCLUSIONS: Community health assessment reports should state their goals and purpose; include the most important aspects of the community's health; allow comparisons with other communities, other benchmarks, and, over time, present data in meaningful subgroups of population; provide sufficient focus on positive characteristics; and document the process and methods that are used to create the CHA.

Community health assessment: driving the need for current, easily accessible population health data.

Community health assessment (CHA) is a core public health function. Community health assessment is a term that describes both a process and its tangible products, such as a community health profile or other types of reports on the status of the community's health and existing influences on its health, including the extent and nature of health-related resources. Assessment has enabled a better understanding of the community's health, and this has impacted public health decisions. The authors use the framework for community health improvement proposed in 1997 by the Institutes of Medicine to show how CHA is part of the community health improvement process. Community health assessment drives the need for current, easily accessible population health data. The importance of Web-based data query systems, the focus of the other articles in this special issue, can be best understood within the broader context of CHA. Selected case examples of how Web-based data query systems have impacted the CHA process in three states are highlighted.

The process to develop a meaningful community health assessment in New York State.

Conducting and producing a meaningful Community Health Assessment (CHA) is an important and essential public health service and a mandatory biennial activity for New York State's (NYS) Local Health Departments. The Assessment Initiative project has allowed the NYS Department of Health to better understand and identify strategies to strengthen CHAs and to develop training, education, and technical assistance programs. The Assessment Initiative project has benefited from participation, coordination, and sharing of resources and expertise with other community health improvement initiatives in NYS, including those that emphasize collaborative approaches to health improvement, workforce development, and expanding access to data.

Measuring the impact of a public health data training program.

In spring and fall of 2000, 109 community health professionals participated in "Public Health Data: Our Silent Partner," a training program developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The two-day training was offered four times in different locations in New York State in response to local health departments and community partners identifying a need for data analysis training. Participants completed evaluations during the training, and they were surveyed within a year of completing the training. This article discusses the impact of the training and suggests ways to increase the value of the training.