Health Education Research, Vol. 17, No. 2, 273,
April 2002
© 2002 Oxford University Press
BOOK REVIEW |
Needs Assessment in Public Health: A Practical Guide for Students and Professionals
Donna J. Petersen and Greg R. Alexander Kluwer Academic/Plenum, New York 2001 138 pp. ISBN 0-306-46530-2
Assistant Professor of Behavioral Sciences and Public Health University of Texas Health Sciences Center Houston School of Public Health at El Paso El Paso, TX
Of the three core functions of public health, assessment, assurance and policy development, assessment may be the most dreaded and feared. This is not because public health professionals don't want to understand what is going on in their communities, but because the job seems so big that they don't know where to begin. In addition, most know that the assessment may raise concerns that they can't deal with and may cause conflicts in the community when there is disagreement about the results.
Needs Assessment in Public Health by Petersen and Alexander provides a truly practical guide for professionals who find themselves responsible for planning a community needs assessment. The book offers a step-by-step guide through the process, and uses case examples that are quite realistic and that will seem familiar to professionals working in the `trenches'. The authors continually stress that needs assessment is a political process, and they offer practical suggestions for making sure that the process is inclusive and fair. They also stress that needs assessment does not end with the discovery of needs, but that it should be a continuous process, involving the enacting of programs and policies and their evaluation. In addition, the authors recognize that sometimes needs will be uncovered that the health professional and their agency cannot address, and they offer some useful ideas for dealing with this problem.
I liked the layout of this book very much. The authors have provided a guide that can be used by professionals in their every day work. From the `start-up planning phase' to the final `resource allocation stage' the authors lay out the steps of the process in plain language and then detail key points in the chapters that follow.
This book would also be an excellent resource for classroom teaching. The authors have provided thought-provoking and challenging discussion questions at the end of each chapter that could be used to guide a class through the assessment process. In a class in which students are actually charged with completing a community assessment, this book would be an invaluable tool. I was especially pleased to see a chapter on effecting program and policy solutions with practical advice for getting through the legislative process—something that is missing from many texts on assessment.
I would recommend this book to public health professionals, and to teachers working with students of health education, public health, nursing and public policy. It is brief, to the point and full of useful tools for anyone planning a community needs assessment.
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