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Choose Needs to be Addressed

Designing your Implementation Strategy: It's time to craft a plan to take action! Start by identifying the significant health needs you will address.

Click on an item below for details:

Step 1: Choose Significant Needs to Address

In the assess and prioritize phases, you identified the significant health needs in your community and prioritized the needs that are the most important to you, your organization and your community. However, your capacity as an organization may prevent you from implementing programs that address all significant health needs.

Use the results from your prioritization session to select the list of needs you plan to address.

Quick Tip: More isn't always better! You may find it more prudent to focus your resources on a few key issues, develop a solid evaluation plan, and demonstrate impact that can be replicated with other priorities in the future.

Step 2: Justify Significant Needs You Don't Plan to Address

Provide a justification or explanation for significant needs in your community that you do not plan to address.

Here are a few sample justifications to consider:

  • Other needs deemed a higher priority to address (look to prioritization outcomes)
  • Issue being addressed by other facilities or organizations in the community
  • Hospital does not have expertise/competencies to address the issue effectively
  • Insufficient resources (financial/personnel)
  • Lack of evidence-based interventions
  • Issue not a priority for community members

Important Note for Hospitals:
In explaining why it does not intend to address a significant health need for purposes of paragraph (c)(1)(ii) of this section, a brief explanation of the hospital facility's reason for not addressing the health need is sufficient. Such reasons may include, for example, resource constraints, other facilities or organizations in the community addressing the need, a relative lack of expertise or competency to effectively address the need, the need being a relatively low priority, and/or a lack of identified effective interventions to address the need.

IRS Community Health Needs Assessment Rule 12/31/14

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