The Community health needs assessment: An underappreciated tool

In today’s episode, we explore some big questions about community health — and how hospitals and health care workers can help promote equitable health outcomes in their communities.

The Community Health Needs Assessment, or CHNA, is a  powerful tool for promoting health equity, says Leslie Marshburn, Vice President of Strategy & Population Health at Grady Health System.

“We want to be hearing directly from the individuals that we serve — what they believe their community health needs are,” Marshburn says. The information is coupled with public data, “ideally at the most granular level, like the census track or zip code. And so those national data sets can help inform what the needs are, and then layering that with the community voice through your primary data collection and synthesizing all of that helps you identify your priorities.”

When it comes to improving health outcomes in communities, it’s also critical that health care providers understand health disparities, says Dr. Maura George, an associate professor in the Department of Medicine and an internist at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, where she also serves as Medical Director of Ethics. 

“I think clinicians who don't know how to recognize disparities are going to perpetuate them, and we can all do that unintentionally,” George says. “I think knowing our own internalized bias, implicit bias is important, because you have to realize how that can interact in the patient care space.”

Marshburn and George joined Movement Is Life’s summit as workshop panelists, and spoke with steering committee member Dr. Zachary Lum for this podcast episode.

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