The relevance of rapid assessment to health research and interventions

This paper introduces the special issue on rapid assessment methods for tropical disease research. It highlights disease control problems that the combined skills of social and biomedical scientists must address, as well as problems hampering multidisciplinary research. Traditional social science and epidemiological methods are often too time-consuming to address the immediate and urgent needs of disease control programmes. Rapid assessment methods to provide information on health status, health impact, health services and health behaviour are therefore essential. A distinction is made between the efficacy of disease control tools and community effectiveness (the efficacy of the tools as applied at the community level), and the potential for rapid assessment to improve community effectiveness is emphasized. The development and validation of rapid assessment methods is discussed, and the techniques described more fully in subsequent papers are introduce