For health-related indicators, some excellent places to start are Health Indicators Warehouse (HIW), which provides a wide variety of health indicators with national, state, and community data Community Health Status Indicators (CHSI), which provides local public health agencies access to county health status profiles and County Health Rankings, which provides rankings of each county within each state according to its health outcomes and health determinants. There are many places to find information on community-level indicators. An example would be monitoring smoking through the community-level indicator of sales of cigarettes in the community, rather than by polling people to find out how many cigarettes each person smoked daily. (They indicate what’s happening at the community level, rather than the individual level.) Community-level indicators offer objective measures of outcomes. What are community-level indicators?Ĭommunity-level indicators are measures that refer to population groups rather than individuals.
In this section, we’ll explain further how to identify and choose community-level indicators to fit your needs, and give some guidance as to what kinds of indicators you might look for in a given field. The section included a number of examples of possible community-level indicators for different issues: substance use, teen pregnancy prevention, tobacco control, injury prevention, and violence prevention. In the previous section, Gathering and Using Community-Level Indicators, we introduced community-level indicators, and briefly discussed why and when they can be used and how to gather them. Using community-level indicators had helped the Coalition provide community members with better access to services. As a result, Health-for-All learned that a larger number of citizens were, in fact, seeking regular health care, and that the Coalition’s work had borne fruit.
They also tracked the number of community residents who received free care at local hospitals, the number of seniors who received subsidized home care, and other statistics. They got information about the percent of adults seen by a doctor in the past year for a routine checkup, the percent who did not have a medical home, number of community health clinic visits for people of various ages, and how many visits to the sliding-scale clinics were of patients who could afford to pay little or nothing. The Coalition selected some community-level indicators to help them understand if progress was being made. The Payneside Health-for-All Coalition wanted to better understand the effectiveness of its effort to make health services more accessible to everyone in the community. Learn how to identify and choose community-level indicators to fit your needs and what kinds of indicators you might look for in a given field.