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Community Health Needs Assessment

A Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA), also known as Community Health Assessment (CHA), refers to state, tribal, local, or territorial health assessment that identifies key health needs and issues through systematic, comprehensive data collection and analysis.

Community health needs assessments use such principles as:

  • Multisector collaboration 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 a community’s health outcomes.
  • A definition of community that encompasses both a significant enough area to allow for population-wide interventions and measurable results, and includes 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 highest quality data pooled from, and shared among, diverse public and private sources.
The Public Health Accreditation board defines community health assessment as a systematic examination of the health status indicators for a given population that is used to identify key problems and assets in a community. The ultimate goal of a community health assessment is to develop strategies to address the community’s health needs and identified issues. A variety of tools and processes may be used to conduct a community health assessment; the essential ingredients are community engagement and collaborative participation. of the health status indicators for a given population that is used to identify key problems and assets in a community. The ultimate goal of a community health assessment is to develop strategies to address the community’s health needs and identified issues. A variety of tools and processes may be used to conduct a community health assessment; the essential ingredients are community engagement and collaborative participation.

More information about community health needs assessments can be found: https://www.cdc.gov/stltpublichealth/cha/plan.html

The Casper-Natrona County Health Department and Wyoming Medical Center are co-sponsoring the 2018 Natrona County Health Needs Assessment.
The 2018 Community Health Needs Assessment includes:
-A Community Health Status Report, which is a systematic examination of health status indicators for Natrona County residents. Please view the report here