Research on Otitis media among Aboriginal children from age 0 yrs to 5years.
Assignment - Community/population needs assessment
Assignment content
State your specific population/community.
Choose a subgroup of one of the following populations:
- Migrant groups in Australia
- Seniors
- International prac students may choose a population from the country they are travelling to.
You are required to describe a population or community and discuss the social determinants of health and health issues within your chosen population or community. You must narrow your population to a geographical area e.g. a town, city or region or state; or to a well-defined community such as an ethnic group or other minority. Listen to the community development lectures to get ideas on how you could define your community. Reflect on what you learnt in your mental health, Child health and Culture units and think back to Foundations when you studied developmental theories as you need to show that you understand the characteristics and issues that are specific to your group.
You need to define your population in your introduction and present demographic and epidemiological data to support your description of the health issues. You need to narrow down your health issues and show the significance of a particular issue to your chosen population or sub-group of your population. The health issue and population will be the central part of your next assignment so they must be clearly stated in your conclusion. Please remember to focus on a health issue for which you can develop a health promotion program. It is highly recommended that you undertake assignment 2 at the same time.
Demographics
In this section you need to show that you can find and use epidemiological data (statistics) to describe your population group. Start broad by providing some data about pregna For example: If you chose ‘pregnant Aboriginal teenagers' as your population (you can narrow it down even further, perhaps Aboriginal girls living in remote communities of northern WA, if you have enough data about that population); you would give a broad description of this population (age, gender, location, etc) and then compare these data to the rest of Australia and/or changes over time in order to give some context and meaning to the data. Make sure you compare groups using the same measurements (percentage, ratio etc) so that they can be appropriately compared.
Health Issues
Outline the health issues (e.g. Infectious diseases, injuries, dental, hearing etc) relevant to your population. Give a broad overview and then narrow down and be more specific; e.g. you may find data to show that STIs are a particular problem for your population and the focus of your health issue is then about sexual health. You can assume that the reader has basic knowledge about your health issue so there is no need to describe the pathology/signs/symptoms etc unless it is specifically relevant to your health issue.
Social determinants of health (SDoH)
Now that you have narrowed down both your population/community group and health issues to a manageable level; you need to outline the social determinants of health that relate to your target group and health issue. You should address at least three different SDoH but some of you will cover more - it depends on how well you keep to the word limit and the significance of your social determinants.