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Engaging the Community and Assessing Their Mental Health Needs

Engaging the community and assessing their mental health needs is vital before selecting a new program or practice to implement. Engaging people from the target community in the needs assessment is essential. With their partnership, designing, providing, and evaluating programs and practices can better address needs. The needs assessment will identify: community mental health needs, strengths, and their underlying factors; existing mental health services and gaps; and solutions to address these needs.

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Key Components

  • Community Engagement: Participation in assessing needs, planning, and implementing health interventions is a fundamental right for all,1 and includes designing, providing, and evaluating mental health services within a community. Community mental health organizations and programs can begin by developing a strategic plan to guide the partnership process, paying attention to principles of community engagement such as co-learning/co-production, humility, relationship building, resource sharing, action and change, and sustainment.1 Community engagement strategies around mental health services can include promoting awareness of and access to services, reducing stigma, optimizing community members' ability to participate, mapping community resources that can be leveraged for engagement, enacting culturally relevant strategies for engaging various communities in services, problem solving when engagement does not work, and addressing various barriers and enhancing facilitators to engagement.
  • Mental Health Needs Assessment: A mental health needs assessment ideally identifies and prioritizes community mental health strengths and needs, including data on the prevalence of mental health issues. Information about strengths, needs, and underlying factors (e.g., non-medical determinants of health) are gathered through multiple types of data from representative groups, following community engagement strategies. At the same time, information is gathered on existing community mental health services (resource mapping), including evidence-based and community defined evidence-based services.2 Results of a mental health needs assessment can then lead toward selection of effective practices to address unmet needs and service gaps.3

Why This Topic Matters for Implementation

Engaging all parts of a target community and understanding their mental health needs are the first steps toward preparing, implementing, and sustaining effective mental health programs and practices. 

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