Health Needs Assessment In Inner Cities: Does Zip Code Analysis Reveal Better Results?

Abstract

Health needs assessments can utilize information regarding perceived needs of the community in order to effectively disseminate resources to address these needs (Beverly, McAtee, Costello, Chernoff, & Casteel, 2005; Rohrer, 2009), and to provide a snapshot of families in a service area and their economic well-being, educational status, health, and welfare (Moore, 2009). A community health needs assessment is a dynamic process that involve the community to identify health problems and goals so that implementation of health priorities and systematic action planning can improve the quality and quantity of services needed for that community (Holt, 2008; Lee, Ackerson, Flodin, & Slatin, 2010). As a result, a community needs assessment can establish a basis for change wherein agencies can develop comprehensive strategic planning for health initiatives based on community needs. Proenca, Rosko & Zinn (2000) reported that community health assessments that are conducted by over 60 percent of hospitals were able to understand the health needs within their service areas and to identify gaps in service offerings and/or to improve current service offerings. The use of a community based approach allows for understanding the needs of the people that are served by the hospital, and the community from which the patients are drawn by focusing on the community as a whole (Proenca,Rosko, & Zinn, 2000). By taking this view, a community becomes arecognized stakeholder and the health needs can be addressed in a strategic fashion.

Despite evident progress in assessing the area’s unmet health care needs, it is important to point out one important caveat. Health needs assessment efforts in local communities often use methodologies such as surveys, focus groups, population based studies, or statewide data in which descriptive statistics are computed and confidence intervals are revealed. Results often represent the central tendency (average) of the population studied, and when there are significant economic and demographic differences amongst communities which may result in health disparities, descriptive statistics tend to be insignificant due to high variance. Generally, results showing insignificant confidence intervals may actually be a sign of health disparities, but it does not pinpoint specific concerns and needs of communities, and most importantly, where the most communities are in the boundaries of the studied population. This particular problem could be eliminated by analyzing health and health needs of local communities at a smaller geographic area such as zip codes; rather than overall community or average community. Therefore, this study is to examine differences and/or variances in results of the 2007 Long Beach Health Needs Assessment Survey by conducting an analysis of the data using various zip codes. Zip code analysis was undertaken to determine specific areas where there are gaps in health services, as perceived by the participants, and community organizations and hospitals.