Health Assessment

To conduct a health assessment for a corporation with 800 employees, a nurse will need to carefully construct questions to elicit truthful and accurate answers.  Busch (n. d.) says that the assessment must first know the purpose.  The assessment plan needs to aim to answer certain points such as what needs are not being met as well as assessing what the company aims for its employees.  There are several methods a nurse may use to gather information and determine where the shortfalls are.  

(Survey omitted for preview. Available via download)

Surveys take much time to make but they take little time to answer.  To test the entire 800 employees, a survey is a great way to gain about the employees and their health needs.  For instance, if employees smoke, it would be wise to make a campaign to quit smoking a priority.  It will save the corporation money in lost time and improve health.

Another way to do an assessment is to interview members of the targeted community – in this case, the 800 employees.  The employees can be asked at random to share their needs, issues, and ideas with the assessment team.  The sampling of a few random employees usually speaks for the entire group.  This type of assessment is qualitative and useful in creating a nursing plan. 

As Busch (n. d.) says, once the assessment team gathers information from the government agencies and from the employees, the assessment team can identify the employees’ needs.  They also can tell what is not working and what people are doing that is in line with what the government assessed.  The most important thing to remember when conducting an assessment is to structure the questions to gain the information needed to find where the company needs to improve its health programs for employees and where there needs to be a change.

Reference

Busch, C. E. (n. d.). Chapter 3: Assessing health education needs: A multidimensional-multimethod approach [PDF]. In The Handbook of Health Education (pp. 49-73).