A community health assessment is an examination of the health status indicators for a given population that is used to identify key problems and assets in a community. The goal of a community health assessment is to develop strategies to address the community’s health needs and identified issues. Students need to conduct a needs assessment for a target population around a selected health topic (examples include smoking among college students, teen births among teens in a specified county, deaths by suicide among high school students, etc.) Students must find a public data base, manually enter, or download data that is relevant to the health issue and create an appropriate graph or chart in excel to display data. It is up to the student to review the data for accuracy, relevance to the health issue identified, ensure the data are the most current available (data should have been retrieved in the last 5 years), manually enter, or download the data in Excel, and then create an appropriate bar chart, trend line or graph representing the data. This graph should be incorporated in Section I.
Reputable data sources can include (but are not limited to) the following:
• SC DHEC SCAN Data – data retrieved from birth records, maternal monitoring and death records by age, race, ethnicity, and county
• SC Department of Education Data – data retrieved from attendance records and testing records by grade, district, race, ethnicity, and county
• Kids Count Data Center – data retrieved from Census records, YRBS data, economic data and health records and organized by county
• Census Data Sources – data represents economic, social and population indicators on the national level from the US Census and reported by county
• SC DSS Data and Reports – reports on child placement, types of abuse and neglect, child welfare data, adult protective services data available by county
• SC YRBS Data – data represents prevalence of risky behaviors among childhood and early adolescence, and reported by age, race, ethnicity, and county.
• SC DPS Data – data represents prevalence of children and youth as victims of crime, arrests among juveniles and incarcerations among juveniles, and reported by age, race, ethnicity, and county.
This section should not exceed 2 pages, typed double space using Times New Roman 12-point font.
This section requires outside references to be used. Section I must use at least 5 valid and reputable references published within the last 5 years, of which at least 3 are from peer reviewed journals. References must be cited in-text and in the reference list per APA 7th edition guidelines.
