#HEALTH PROGRAM PLANNING STEPS PROFESSIONAL CONFERENCES AND#
#HEALTH PROGRAM PLANNING STEPS HOW TO ENCOURAGE THEM#

Understand breastfeeding knowledge and intentions of first-time mothers in your community Step one: Clearly define your needs assessment objectivesWhen defining your objectives, ask yourself: Why are you conducting the needs assessment and what do you plan to do with the findings? For example, if you are working on a program seeking to increase breastfeeding initiation among first-time mothers in a community, your needs assessment objectives may include: Following them will ensure that your needs assessment planning, analysis, and subsequent actions are efficient and effective. They can be utilized across a range of settings (e.g., community, school, hospital, state) to shed light on a variety of topics, such as what programmatic actions should be taken to improve breastfeeding rates in a hospital or increase kindergarten readiness across a state.В It's important to conduct needs assessment at the onset of the project, so that programs areВ appropriately tailored to the individuals and communities youВ serve.Not sure where to begin? To help you get started, we've compiled the seven tips below. This assessments of needs then informs a projectвЂ™s overall plan and approaches by helping you identify targeted strategies and prioritize resources.Needs assessments serve as incredibly powerful tools for decision making, resource allocation, and ultimately reaching programmatic goals.

Step two: Be realistic about your resources and capacityConsider how much time, money and staff capacity you can devote to the needs assessment. The objectives also suggest that survey and/or focus group questions should target topics including, but not limited to, knowledge, intentions, assets, and barriers related to breastfeeding. The objectives in the breastfeeding example show that the needs assessment should collect data from first-time mothers as well as from health care providers and, possibly, lactation consultants and social service providers in the community. Determine necessary training and supports to increase breastfeeding among first-time mothers in your communityConcretely identifying a few, key objectives at the onset will help you identify your needs assessment activitiesвЂ”including who to collect data from and what questions to ask. Assess assets and barriers related to the provision of breastfeeding support in local hospitals and after discharge

Through focus groups, surveys, and interviews, NICHQ captured their current state of knowledge and readiness as well as successes and challenges related to undertaking the aims of the Healthy Start project. Over a three month-period, NICHQ reached 145 stakeholders, including funders, participants, staff and project directors. Step three: Identify target audiences and data sourcesConducting a needs assessment was integral to NICHQвЂ™s programmatic planning and evaluation efforts for the Supporting Healthy Start Performance Project. Teams can also tap into secondary publicly available data, such asВ the National Survey of ChildrenвЂ™s Health or the CDC WONDER databases. If a needs assessment must be conducted quickly and/or with few staff resources, a simple online survey to key stakeholders serves as a powerful (and often free!) tool to collect data critical to informing programmatic efforts.

Health Program Planning Steps How To Encourage Them

If conducting focus groups, be gracious and consider providing snacks, water, or other incentives to participants to thank them for their time and contributions. If sending surveys, include an introductory sentence that shows your appreciation and why the survey responses matter, and be prepared to send multiple reminders to increase response rates. Is it most effective to administer a survey to a wide range of community members, to hold several focus groups with hospital administrators, examine existing reports, or directly observe project participants? Sometimes youвЂ™ll need to conduct several, complementary needs assessment activities to collect data for a range of stakeholders.Consider, also, the competing priorities of your target audience and how to encourage them to participate in your needs assessment. Now, NICHQ can continue to provide technical assistance that is appropriately tailored to support grantees.Given your objectives and resources, consider the target audiences and data sources that will help you assess your needs.

Depending on the nature of your data, you may want to develop graphs, tables, and other visuals to display data as well as a narrative describing results.Then, take a step back, and think about cross-cutting themes that may apply to multiple needs assessment activities, which may help inform priorities for action. Try to summarize and reflect on data for each of your needs assessment objectives individually. Now, itвЂ™s time to dig into that data. Step four: Think small and big when summarizing resultsYouвЂ™ve collected the necessary data to achieve your needs assessment objectives. This tool can be especially powerful for engaging communities that may have been less likely to participate due to language barriers, poverty, or other social determinants. Photovoice is a tool that helps people use videos and photos to share their environment and experiences with others, which can then inform the needs assessment.

This ensures that the people most affected by the program will have power in determining its design. From an equity standpoint, it is especially important to engage community members as equal partners in understanding and translating results from the needs assessment. Step five: Get feedbackWhile developing the needs assessment deliverable, whether it is a formal report, peer-reviewed manuscript or presentation, discuss results with a diverse and inclusive audienceвЂ”including community members, colleagues, funders, project partners and other target audiencesвЂ”who may interpret your needs assessment results differently and identify unique recommendations.

Health Program Planning Steps Professional Conferences And

Step seven: Take actionAt the conclusion of the needs assessment process, review your original objectives with the final results and recommendations. Your efforts may inform and inspire other public health programs working on similar initiatives, and feedback from others can help you move your work to the next level. Present your findings at community events, professional conferences and other relevant venues. This helps ensure that all project stakeholders are on the same page regarding project priorities and resource allocation.

Then, most importantly, take action and use those findings to develop your project approaches.