MY COMMUNITY IN COLUMBIA, MARYLAND 21046
Preparing a Community Health Assessment [WLOs: 1, 2, 3] [CLOs: 1, 2]
This week’s discussion is divided into two parts. Part I asks you to highlight your community’s key and supporting stakeholders. Additionally, you are asked to loosely define the goals of your community needs assessment (CNA) and its purpose based on what you currently believe to be the key issues.
For the stakeholders, refer to the completed template included in these instructions for Hopkins Park, IL, a community noted in several other MPH courses for its extreme poverty. Use this template for your own stakeholders and then paste the completed table into your initial post. As a piece of advice for your goals and purpose, be specific. You will find countless resources that can provide you with the broad goals and purpose of a CNA. However, for full points, you need to explain the goals and purpose of your CNA.
Part II of the discussion asks you to provide broad demographic information for your community. This data will help to ensure you are on the correct path for the weeks ahead.
In any CNA process, it is necessary to establish the scope of the assessment. For those of you living in large cities (more than 1,000,000 people), a needs assessment of the full city is a lifelong endeavor. Conversely, the assessment may initially seem too small for those of you living in small communities (fewer than 10,000 people). Thus, establishing scope is important. For those in large cities, define your neighborhood and use cross streets to define your scope. For those in small communities, examine the towns and villages that surround you or places you regularly interactions with (supermarket, hospital, etc.), and include their community attributes in your study.
At a minimum, your community needs to comprise at least one hospital/clinic, food provider (supermarket, grocery store, etc.), recreation park, and K–12 school district. If your community does not contain those items, then you need to expand out to include the nearest community where you seek those services, or you need to expand to include the whole county.
For this discussion,
Part 1
- Define the purpose of your CNA.
- Define the approximate goals of your CNA.
- List key and supporting community stakeholders (Use the Stakeholder Template Download Stakeholder Template)https://uagc.instructure.com/courses/144449/files/23014937?wrap=1, including the following:
- mayor
- chief of police
- head of city council
- head of chamber of commerce
- parks and recreation director
- school board president
- school district superintendent
- hospital/clinic CEO
- three local business owners
- two leads of community organizations
- two faith leaders
Part 2
To ensure you are on the correct path, answer the following demographic questions about your chosen community. Sites like Explore Health RankingsLinks to an external sitehttps://www.countyhealthrankings.org/explore-health-rankings., Distressed Communities: Interactive MapLinks to an external sitehttps://eig.org/distressed-communities/2022-dci-interactive-map/?view=county., and City-Data.comLinks to an external sitehttps://www.city-data.com/. may help you identify some of the information needed here and in future weeks. Wherever you draw your data from, provide an in-text citation so it can be confirmed.
Answer these questions:
- What is the location of your Community Needs Assessment (CNA)? Include the following:
- Name, State. If using the neighborhood (e.g., Little Havana, Miami, FL), also list the neighborhood name.
- What is the approximate number of people who reside in the community (population)?
- What is the approximate size of the area (square miles)?
- What is the best description of the community setting?
- For example: rural, suburban, urban.
- What is the median household income of the community? Indicate its range as follows:
- < $25,000, $25,000–$34,999, $35,000–$49,999, $50,000–$74,999, ≥ $75,000
- What is the approximate percentage of people in the community with no high school diploma? Indicate its range as follows:
- < 5%, 5–9%, 10–14%, 15–19%, ≥ 20%
- What is the approximate percentage of people in the community who are living in poverty? Indicate its range as follows:
- < 5%, 5–9%, 10–14%, 15–19%, ≥ 20%
- What is the approximate percentage of people in the community who are currently unemployed? Indicate its range as follows:
- < 5%, 5–9%, 10–14%, 15–19%, ≥ 20%
- What is the approximate percentage of people in the community who commute to work using an active mode of transportation (walking, biking, mass transit)? Indicate its range as follows:
- < 5%, 5–9%, 10–14%, 15–19%, ≥ 20%
- Based upon the information from Part I and Part II, what do you initially suspect as being your greatest community needs and why?
