Public Health and Nursing: Feeling the Community’s Pulse

Explore how to profile your community, and deliver a community health needs assessment, with this online public health and nursing course from Coventry University.

Duration

2 weeks

Weekly study

5 hours

100% online

How it works

Included in an ExpertTrack

Course 3 of 5

Get full ExpertTrack access

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Established

1992

Location

Coventry

Learn how to assess what your community’s health needs are

The assessment of patients and clients lies at the heart of nursing practice. It involves identifying current and future health needs as a basis for the planning of therapeutic interventions.

On this course, you’ll have the chance to analyse the community in which you work in order to consider ways of responding to public health challenges.

Understand your health system and how it operates

You’ll explore what it means to assess the health needs of a community, and understand how a community health needs assessment can contribute to overall health performance.

Examining national and local health priorities, you’ll reflect upon what a community is, and how you can profile its health needs in order to intervene effectively.

Explore community profiling and health needs assessment requirements

Alongside nursing experts at Coventry University, you’ll identify epidemiological, comparative, and corporate approaches to a community health needs assessment, examining the merits of each.

You’ll also consider how a systematic approach can be used by nurses to contribute to a local health needs assessment, before reflecting on how you can bring all your learning together to help a community to become healthier.

This course is designed for experienced nurses wanting or needing to extend their understanding of how nurses can act as promoters of health.

  • Week 1

    Community health needs

    • Welcome to the week

      This week we will explore what it means to assess the health needs of a community and how a community health needs assessment contributes to health improvement.

    • What is a community?

      Community is a familiar word that has many meanings. It is important that all nurses, if they are to be more community oriented in their public health role, understand community, what it is and the specific nature of the community

    • Health needs assessment

      We explore health needs assessment at a community level, as well as geographical locality or neighbourhood, and the concept of need. To start, we consider what we need to know about a local community for health needs analysis.

    • What are health needs?

      In this section we will first consider the relationship between human rights and health before examining a framework for assessing community health needs.

    • Review of the week

      Review and reflect on your learning this week.

  • Week 2

    Approaches to assessing community health needs

    • Welcome to the week

      Assessing community and population health needs involves the critical use of routine or available health information.

    • Approaches to community health needs assessment

      In this activity we will discuss further and apply each of the following approaches to a community health needs assessment: epidemiological, comparative and corporate.

    • Local community health needs assessment

      In this section we will consider a systematic approach that can be followed when conducting a community health needs assessment.

    • Summary

      A summary of approaches and techniques involved in health needs assessment.

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