Importance of Health Needs Assessment in the Healthcare Industry

Do you have an elderly at your home? Do they need special care? What could you do if you do not have time to look after them? A good option would be to look for the best healthcare services. They would be able to provide for the specific needs of the elderly in the best possible way. A home healthcare worker would be adequately trained to handle your specific needs of the elderly using their experience and expertise in the healthcare industry.

With a plethora of healthcare jobs near me, finding the best home health care assessment could be a daunting task for most people. A majority of doctors would assess the health requirements of their patients. Using their professional training and adequate clinical experience, they have developed a systematic approach to the assessment. They would use it before beginning the treatment they believe to be effective for the patients. Such a systematic approach has often been missing to assess the overall health requirements of a local or practice population.

The health requirements of individual patients coming through the consulting room might not cover the wider health needs of the community. If people have a health issue that they contemplate cannot be helped by a health service, they may not attend it.

Differentiating between the wider and individual needs of the community has been important in the planning and provision of local health services. If you ignore the needs, there would be a danger of a top-down approach for providing health services. It would rely too heavily on what a few people see as a requirement for the population instead of what they are.

Important points to remember

Assessment of health needs has been a systematic approach for ensuring that the health service makes the most of its resources for efficiently improving the health of the population.

It entails qualitative, comparative, and epidemiological methods for describing the health problems of the population. It would help identify inequalities in health and provide access to various services. It would also determine priorities for the effective use of resources.

Health requirements could benefit from health care or wider environmental and social changes.

Successful assessment of health requirements needs a practical understanding of what has been involved, essential resources, and time for undertaking assessments. It would also need adequate integration of the results into the planning and commissioning of local services.

Health needs assessment

The health needs assessment is not a process of listening to patients or making decisions based on personal experience. It would be a systematic method of identifying those healthcare and health needs of the patients that have not been met so far. It would make significant changes to meet those needs in the best possible way. It would entail a qualitative and epidemiological approach for determining the priorities entailing cost-effectiveness, clinical approach, and perspective of the patient. Rest assured that the approach should balance ethical, clinical, and economic considerations of the specific needs of the patients inclusive of –

  • What they have
  • What should be done
  • What could be done
  • What could be afforded

Assessment of health needs should not be a means to measure ill health. It should assume that something could be done to handle it.