Community diagnosis

Community diagnosis: Is the process of collecting, organising and interpretation of data to identify community health problems.

The advantage of community diagnosis:

• It is one of the methods used to identifying the health issue in the community
• It is used as a baseline information for decision making for intervention
• It forms a baseline data for further comparison purpose
• It helps to set priorities for intervention
• It contributes to identify resources for intervention
• It helps to implement interventions with the participation of all the community.

Mostly, in order to identify nutritional problem in the community nutritional surveillance is done on the particular age group of the population, usually on children and pregnant women. Based on the identified problem and criteria of prioritization, developing a plan of intervention is essential to resolve the problems. In order to undertake community diagnosis, tools for data collection should be considered. Usually, questionnaires are used as a means to collect community-based data.