Windshield Survey / Community Health Assessment / Health Pro…

Click the button below to complete the Windshield Survey Worksheet 1: Assess Your Community activity before you start working on this assessment. Instructions Your ability to complete your assessment is contingent on you having spent time gathering and assessing information about your community, as well as touring your community if you choose. There are several ways to conduct a windshield survey. Take note of your local community when running errands, driving to work, or write a description/narrative of your neighborhood. If you drive through the community, do you see any healthcare facilities? Schools? Empty buildings? Search the Internet for a video of a drive; try “Driving around a small town . . .” on YouTube. This community, which will become the focus of your health promotion plan, could be something like the elderly housing center, high school, or your own neighborhood. It could even be a subset of or an individual within that community, for instance, one of the students at the high school or a resident at the elderly housing center. For example, does your health promotion topic apply to any one community or group within a community? The data you gather there will become the basis of your Health Promotion Research assessment. This involves completing a windshield survey prior to completing the assessment. In this course, the windshield survey has been divided into two parts: Part 1: Assessing the available information about your community. Part 2: Touring a community. Review the assessment instructions. Think about your choice of a community, perhaps the one you live in or one you selected. Then choose one health concern from those listed. You will then need to complete the windshield survey using the worksheets provided. Expect to spend significant time exploring. This first worksheet is the research and assessment component. Conduct a literature search to gather information about the community. Once you’ve completed the worksheet, you can export the information you’ve entered and use it as you work on your assessment. Context The purpose of completing a windshield survey is to become familiar with the community and the population by examining factors that impact the health of the population. This examination allows us to identify strengths and capacities as well as gaps and risks. Healthcare professionals acquire insight and important information necessary to guide work with the population through community assessment. Such an assessment will allow you to develop professional interventions in a collaborative manner, which will hopefully contribute to community empowerment and change appropriate and acceptable for the target population. Educational concepts addressed through such a survey include identification of protective and predictive factors influencing the health of a community or population. Stanhope and Lancaster (2021) identify this survey as a tool to complete an environmental scan the most preliminary and fundamental assessment of the community (p. 213). Using the physical senses of the observer, its purpose is to capture the essence of the community, determine areas for further investigation, and sense of the tone of the community (p. 213).