Conducting the federally mandated community health needs assessment for a small non-profit hospital

Per the requirements in the Affordable Care Act of 2010, any medical facility receiving federal funds must perform a community health needs assessment (CHNA) every three years. The main objective of this assessment is to develop and implement a program that acts as a community benefit to the public health of the target population. This essay reflects the CHNA experiences at The Children’s Home of Pittsburgh (TCH), which aimed to establish the needs of its patient population. Results from the needs assessment will be used to establish interventions to meet the identified needs, within range of TCH’s services. TCH crafted community surveys and disseminated those surveys to agencies that serve the pediatric population. Providers who received the surveys administered them to their clients then returned them to TCH. The initial surveys showed 28% of respondents chose “access to basic needs for families” as their most pressing concern ranked out of seven possible choices with “basic parenting skills” at 20%. Key informant interviews with professionals that serve the pediatric community supported those results. With this in mind, TCH seeks to implement a program available to the community offering new parent education and a support group for parents held at TCH. This essay will also discuss the obstacles and challenges we faced during the CHNA process. The public health significance of the CHNA is that can be a very useful tool in improving care and public health outcomes. During the CHNA process, we ran into obstacles caused by our limitations as a small, niche hospital required to meet the same standards as a multi-billion-dollar hospital. The CHNA could benefit hospitals in serving their specific populations better by altering their requirements based on factors like size and scope of services. The CHNA is designed to improve services offered by hospitals by creating a community benefit. Making it clearer who defines “community” and allowing hospitals to define what their “community benefit” would be would have a larger impact on the public health of the populations each hospital is trying to serve