Freebie Friday: Rural Health Needs Assessment and Program Evaluation

Posted by nnlmneo on December 5th, 2014 Posted in: Blog

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Rural and medically underserved areas often have challenges including both increased health disparities and population health issues combined with limited resources and healthcare providers to help meet these challenges. The use of appropriate program evaluation measures can help to assess what actually works for rural health settings since many evidence-based strategies are based on urban and non-rural populations.

The Rural Assistance Center (raconline.org) has recently issued a freely available online guide at  http://www.raconline.org/topics/rural-health-research-assessment-evaluation The guide is intended to help an organization

• Identifies the similarities and differences among rural health research, assessment, and evaluation
• Discusses common methods, such as surveys and focus groups
• Provides contacts within the field of rural health research
• Addresses the importance of community-based participatory research to rural communities
• Looks at the community health needs assessment (CHNA) requirements for non-profit hospitals and public health
• Examines the importance of building the evidence-base so interventions conducted in rural areas have the maximum possible impact

Thanks to National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM) Network member (what does that mean?) Gail Kouame from HEALWA for sharing this great resource with us at the Outreach Evaluation Resource Center (OERC)! Do you have an evaluation-related resource to share? We would be happy to consider featuring it in our blog or possible inclusion in our Tools and Resources guide.

Note: links updated 9/21/2017.