Community Health Assessments

A community health assessment (sometimes called a CHA), also known as community health needs assessment (sometimes called a CHNA), refers to an assessment that identifies key health needs and issues through systematic, comprehensive data collection and analysis. SHA has the experience to guide your assessment at any point in the process using the following general principles: multi sector collaborations that support shared ownership of all phases of community health improvement including assessment, planning, investment, implementation, and evaluation; proactive, broad, and diverse community engagement to improve results; a definition of community that encompasses both a significant enough area to allow for population-wide interventions and measurable results, and includes a targeted focus to address disparities among subpopulations; maximum transparency to improve community engagement and accountability; use of evidence-based interventions and encouragement of innovative practices with thorough evaluation; evaluation to inform a continuous improvement process; and the use of the highest quality data pooled from, and shared among, diverse public and private sources.