NURS 6710 Week 4 community assessment example

Community Assessment, Opening Section: Four Census Tracts, an Advisory Group Convened First and a Data Inventory Sorted by Geography

Student Name

College of Nursing, Walden University

NURS 6710: Public Health Nursing Theory and Practice

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Community Assessment, Opening Section: Four Census Tracts, an Advisory Group Convened First and a Data Inventory Sorted by Geography

Boundary Statement

This assessment covers four census tracts along a composite state-route corridor on the eastern edge of a mid-sized city, identified here as Tracts 14.01, 14.02, 15 and 16.03. They were chosen for two reasons. Public survey and health estimates are reported at the tract level, so data can be matched to the boundary without guesswork. And residents describe roughly this stretch, from the rail overpass to the county line, as one place: the corridor. The boundary excludes the newer subdivision to the north, which shares a ZIP code with the corridor but not its housing, transit or employment. About 9,000 people live within it, an illustrative figure for the composite.

Mobilize: An Advisory Group Before the Data

MAP-IT, the planning framework presented with Healthy People, begins with mobilizing partners before assessing needs (Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion [ODPHP], 2020). This assessment follows that order, because residents often know which questions matter before any table does. An illustrative advisory group has been convened, described here by role only: the chair of the residents' association at the manufactured-home park, who can speak to housing conditions and how warnings reach residents; the school nurse at the corridor's elementary school, who sees asthma and missed care in children; the food pantry coordinator, who knows which households are struggling and when; and a driver on the bus route that serves the corridor, who sees who travels, at what hours and where people wait. Each member is asked to review the questions this assessment will try to answer, to say where the data are likely to mislead and to help plan how findings will be shared. The group meets monthly during the assessment, and its comments are recorded with the date of each meeting.

Data Inventory

The inventory lists the sources the assessment will draw on, sorted by the geography at which each reports. Geography matters because data reported at different levels cannot simply be combined, and a figure for a larger area can hide what is happening in a smaller one.

Table 1

Data Sources by Geography, With What Each Provides and Its Limits

Sources at the county level are used only for comparison, never as a description of the corridor.

What Comes Next

The next steps are a windshield survey of the corridor, an epidemiological review of the one figure most often quoted about it and an analysis of determinants for the problems residents raise first. Community assessment frameworks used in nursing treat assessment as a process shared with the community rather than done to it (Anderson & McFarlane, 2019), and the advisory group will review each section before the assessment is finalized.

References

Anderson, E. T., & McFarlane, J. (2019). Community as partner: Theory and practice in nursing (8th ed.). Wolters Kluwer.

Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. (2020). MAP-IT: A guide to using Healthy People 2020 in your community. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

U.S. Census Bureau. (2020). Understanding and using American Community Survey data: What all data users need to know. U.S. Government Publishing Office.