Public Health Needs Assessment

  “Development of a Needs Assessment” is your first assignment in the development of your final project for this course, Designing and Evaluating a Health Promotion Program. Create a written plan for planning and evaluating a healthy eating or nutrition intervention for your state. Developing a needs assessment is one of the first steps in developing your plan and evaluation strategy. Refer to the Final Project Instructions document for more details. According to the program planning and evaluation frameworks we discussed in Module 1, conducting a needs assessment is the first step in program planning; however, public health practitioners and clinicians are often asked to use a needs assessment to justify the need for a specific type of intervention. In this assignment, you will conduct a needs assessment for your state demonstrating the need for a healthy eating/nutrition program. The needs assessment is a critical component of the final project. The selection of your intervention will be based on your target population. The needs assessment should be 3-5 pages in length. You’ll need to use numbers to tell your story. Using publicly-available data, describe the population demographics of your state; identify and describe a target population for the nutrition program, and explain your rationale for why this population needs this program and demonstrate your reasoning with numbers. Include a description of relevant social and environmental factors as well as the health behaviors and relevant disease indicators. Be sure to clearly characterize your target population by including information on the age range, race/ethnicity, geographic location, socioeconomic status, or health status of this population. For example, your target population could be adults, school children, low-income adults, African-American families with children under 12, adults with Type-2 diabetes, or people who live in a particular area of the state. It is important to be as specific as possible when characterizing your target population.