Selected Model
The model proposed by the Association for Community Health Improvement, the Community Health Assessment toolkit, was chosen. It consists of nine steps, the purpose of which is to assess individual health using various indicators (CDC, 2023). Among them are health resources, health potential, and health balance.
Health resources are morpho-functional and psychological capabilities of the body to positively change the balance of health. The potential of health is the totality of an individual’s abilities to adequately respond to the impact of external factors (CDC, 2023). Health balance is a pronounced state of balance between the potential of health and the factors acting on it. This toolkit addresses all these factors to fully implement a community health assessment.
Benefits
Some benefits of using this specific model to assess a community are as follows. First, it allows you to evaluate health on several levels at once. These are the health of social and ethnic groups, the health of administrative territories, and the health of the population and society as a whole (CDC, 2023). In addition, the essential concept of an individual’s health is changing in this evaluation scheme. The criterion is not the presence of a particular pathology, but the degree of its biological compensation. This makes it possible to assess the real situation more sensibly rather than theoretically.
Agencies Included
Agencies that should be included in the assessment include representatives of the health-centric healthcare paradigm. In addition, it is necessary to attract a contingent of people of different ages and genders to the region’s population and persons subject to medical examination (CDC, 2023). In addition, agencies that should be included in the assessment are listed in the health insurance companies’ database as part of the information on the incidence of the selected contingent for the previous year.
Reasonable Time Frame
A reasonable time frame for completing a community-wide assessment is 25-30 minutes per patient. This is enough time to collect medical data on more than 600 items (CDC, 2023), including the results of a questionnaire on complaints and laboratory and instrumental examination. A medium-sized community usually takes about two weeks (CDC, 2023). Thus, the final time of a community-wide assessment depends on the number of patients.
Role of Public Nurse
The public nurse has a giant role in implementing the chosen ACHI Community Health Assessment toolkit. They are the ones who conduct basic questionnaires and surveys, doing most of the work (CDC, 2023). Thus, nurses give doctors the opportunity and time to devote to people who need additional medical examination or consultations with specialists. Public nurses perform most of the work of collecting data and entering it into special databases for further processing.
Efficiency
This model will work well for my community assessment because my community is quite heterogeneous. It includes people of different nationalities and ages. They have different health problems of varying degrees. Therefore, due to its diversity, the ACHI Community Health Assessment toolkit model can be flexible (CDC, 2023). For each community member, a step from the model will be used that suits their characteristics. Therefore, the flexible, detailed approach makes the chosen model more effective than other, more versatile and average models.
Reference
CDC. (2023). Community health assessment. STLT Gateway. Web.