Awareness about community diagnosis among health care professionals in South India: A cross-sectional study

Context: Community diagnosis is the process of appraising the health status of a community and developing a consensus about priority health problems & strategies to address the identified issues. The information on awareness among health professionals is lacking. Aims: To assess the level of awareness about community diagnosis among the health care professionals of various cadres. Settings and Design: A cross sectional study was conducted among the participants of National Seminar on Evidence Based and Integrated Medicine at a Research Institute in Kasaragod, Kerala conducted in association with an International University. Method and Material: Study was conducted among 181 health professionals including nursing students and faculty, medical students, practitioners and faculty and paramedical health workers. All the participants were taken as subjects for this study. They were invited to fill in a pre tested structured questionnaire The results: The study population included 181 participants. The mean age was 23.5±9.2 years. The majority of them belonged to the nursing profession (87.8%) and 84.5% had heard of community diagnosis before. Among them, 64.6% felt that it can be used to study both Communicable (CD) and Non communicable diseases (NCDs), 76.2% had the correct information about the concept of spot mapping in community diagnosis, 87.3% felt that nursing care needs can be studied using community diagnosis and 87.3% of them were of the opinion that it could be a tool for integrated healthcare. Conclusions: The level of awareness about community diagnosis in the study population was high. The areas like follow up of the population, following up of community, using Community Diagnosis for the study of both CD and NCDs and spot mapping about which subjects need more awareness.