A Community Assessment Model Appropriate for the Iranian Community

Background: Community assessment is one of the core competencies for public health professionals; mainly because it gives them a better understanding of the strengths and drawbacks of their jurisdictions. We planned to recognize an appropriate model that provides a conceptual framework for the Iranian community. Methods: This study was conducted in Tehran, during 2009-2010 and consisted of two parts: a review of the litera-ture and qualitative interview with selected experts as well as focus group discussion with health field staff. These steps were done to develop a conceptual framework: planning for a steering committee, forming a working committee, re-viewing community assessment models and projects, preparing the proposed model draft, in-depth interview and fo-cused group discussions with national experts, finalizing the draft, and preparing the final model. Results: Three different models published and applied routinely in different contexts. The 2008 North Carolina Community Assessment model was used as a reference. Ten national and 18 international projects were compared to the reference and one and six projects were completely compatible with this model, respectively. Conclusion: Our final proposed model takes communities through eight steps to complete a collaborative communi-ty assessment: form a community assessment team, solicit community participation and gain inter-sectoral collabora-tion, establish a working committee, empower the community, collect and analyze community’s primary and second-ary statistics, solicit community input to select health priorities, evaluate the community assessment and develop the community assessment document, an develop the community action plans.