Community Health Needs Assessment

What is a Community Health Needs Assessment?

A community health assessment (sometimes called a CHA), also known as community health needs assessment (sometimes called a CHNA), refers to a state, tribal, local, or territorial health assessment that identifies key health needs and issues through systematic, comprehensive data collection and analysis.
Community health assessments use such principles as:

Multisector 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
Use of the highest quality data pooled from, and shared among, diverse public and private sources