Talking about public health can be tricky, because so many of the terms we use sound like jargon. When public health professionals are talking to each other, that may not be a problem; but when we’re trying to explain our work to community members or professionals from other sectors, the words we use might be confusing. Because CHNA 20 is deeply committed to growing collaborative relationships with all members of our communities -- not just the public health experts -- we’ll be periodically sharing simple explanations of complicated-sounding jargon we use when we discuss our work. We hope this will help demystify some of the jargon and make our efforts more understandable and accessible to our communities.

What is a Community Health Assessment (CHA)/Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA)?

A CHA or CHNA (not to be confused with a Community Health Network Alliance, like CHNA 20!) is a systematic examination and analysis of the key health issues and assets in a community.

In other words, it’s a way of researching and learning about what makes people in a community healthier or less healthy.

Just like with any research study or large-scale project, a CHA can be done poorly or well. In order to be a well-done CHA, the assessment should follow these key principles:

Multi-sector collaboration -- Lots of people and organizations should be involved in the CHA, not just public health professionals.
Comprehensive community engagement -- The best way to learn about a community’s needs and strengths is to ask as many people in the community as possible.
Broad yet detailed definition of community -- It should be easy to determine exactly whose needs the CHA is trying to research.
Maximum transparency -- Community members and organizations who want to know what’s happening and how data has been collected should be able to easily get the answers they seek.
Use of evidence-based interventions -- Data and best practices should be the starting point for solving any problems the CHA uncovers.
Thorough evaluation -- We should always be able to measure how well we’re doing at solving the problems we discover.
High-quality, shared data -- A good CHA should contain strong facts and figures, collected using professional standards. That data should also include some numbers from trusted sources, and new data should be strong enough for others to use in future projects.

What is a Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP)?

A CHIP is the natural next step after the completion of a CHA. A Community Health Improvement Plan is a long-term, systematic effort to address community health issues, based on the findings from a community health assessment. The plan is used by a variety of stakeholders to identify priority areas and define actions to improve the health of a community.

In other words, after spending a lot of time and effort learning about the health challenges in a community and researching best practices, the team leading the project would create a step-by-step plan to start solving the problems. That’s a CHIP.

What might this look like in real life?
Let’s say that, for example, a community named Smithtown wants to conduct a CHA to learn more about their residents’ health needs. They might first put together a team of researchers to do the systematic examination and analysis of the key health issues and assets. Those researchers might start by gathering a team of people from all different professions: Hospital and health care workers, small business owners, educators and school administrators, municipal planners, and many others (multi-sector collaboration). The team could help in a variety of ways, including helping the researchers get in contact with other community members like patients, parents, students, older residents, residents seeking support services from local agencies, and so on (comprehensive community engagement). They might also want to especially seek input and engagement from certain groups of people, like immigrant families or families at a certain income level (broad yet detailed definition of the community being served).

When doing the research and putting together the findings, the Smithtown CHA team would always make sure to tell people what they’re doing, what kind of information they’re collecting and how it will be used so that the people they’re working with can give their informed consent to participate (maximum transparency). The team would collect anecdotal data through interviews, surveys, and focus groups, and also look at numerical data shared by trusted sources, such as local hospital figures or regional health studies (high-quality, shared data). Once the CHA has been compiled and any public health challenges in the community are identified, the Smithtown team would have to make decisions about how to solve those challenges. They might look at case studies from other similar locations to find out how these problems have been handled in other places, or look at research that demonstrates proven strategies that might help (use of evidence-based interventions). Importantly, before doing anything to solve the community problems, the team would decide how to keep track of their problem-solving efforts, and how to determine whether or not those efforts are actually working to help the community (thorough evaluation).

How do CHAs and CHIPs relate to the Blue Hills Community Health Alliance?

As a public health networking organization, the bulk of our work is based on CHAs and CHIPs! We may not always call them that, but whenever you hear us talking about gathering community data, conducting a needs assessment process or planning an implementation phase, what we most likely mean is that we’re participating at some level in a CHA or CHIP process.

We also determine priorities for our own work through looking at data from existing CHAs. For example, every three years, our local hospitals conduct a CHA process as required by the Affordable Care Act. The data they publish from those efforts has been instrumental in helping us design innovative projects to help the community, like our transportation initiative.

You can learn more about how the Blue Hills Community Health Alliance is currently working with CHAs and CHIPs by following the updates from the Blue Hills Regional Coordinating Council, or reading about our role with the Randolph Community Wellness Plan. If you have further questions about this topic or want to know how to get involved in similar work in our area, please contact us.