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Needs Assessment: A Practical Guide to Assessing Local Needs for Services for Drug Users

Chapter 1: Why do Needs Assessment?

What is needs assessment?

Needs assessment has been defined as the process of measuring the extent and nature of the needs of a particular target population so that services can respond to them (Hooper 1999). Needs assessment is, therefore, a valuable tool for informing the planning process.

It is important to be clear about whose needs are the focus of the needs assessment. Ultimately, needs assessment should focus on the needs of the target population rather than on the needs of service providers. Nevertheless, service providers have a significant contribution to make to the process.

It is also important for the partners engaged in the needs assessment to clarify and agree what is meant by "needs". Pallant (2002) explained that needs exist when a benefit can be achieved from an intervention, and a measurable improvement can occur as a result of a change.

Why do needs assessment?

Needs assessment is the key to ensuring that the required range and capacity of services is available and accessible to drug users and their families in a local area. A good needs assessment process will:

• identify the needs of a target population in a particular area;

• help to prioritise those needs to ensure better planning of local services and more effective allocation of resources;

• develop an implementation plan that outlines how identified needs will be addressed.

The outcome of a needs assessment should be that drug users and their families have their individual assessed needs met, or met more effectively. Where appropriate, it should also address the needs of families or carers.

The evidence is that most drug users will have a range of needs and that a wide range of agencies and service providers may have a role in responding to those needs. This means that needs assessment in the drugs field is a complex task, requiring time and effort and a wide range of skills. However, if the process becomes part of on-going "core business" activity, and systems are put in place to support it, the scale of the task will be reduced and become more manageable.

Who should do needs assessment?

Needs assessment is a strategic activity that should be closely linked to the planning process. Therefore, DAAT partners have an important role to play in carrying out or commissioning such exercises in their area. Furthermore, needs assessment can be undertaken on a number of different levels, e.g. at a regional level, at a community or neighbourhood level, or at the level of a single agency or service. Services for drug users increasingly involve multiple agencies. At some point, key staff responsible for planning services at all of these levels may be required to carry out a needs assessment.

Before beginning a needs assessment, it is important to identify the right people to be involved in the process, since the implementation of agreed outcomes will be entirely dependent on these people. It will usually be helpful to set up a steering group whose remit is to lead the needs assessment. The steering group should bring together individuals with a range of skills and responsibilities, including data analysts. It is the task of this group to ensure that the process is done properly, that it is completed within a reasonable timescale, and that the findings result in action.

Hooper and Longworth (2002) suggest that those involved in the process should comprise:

• those who know about the issues relating to the target population: service providers or practitioners; people with research expertise in the area

• those who care about those issues: representatives from the target population, from family or carer groups, or from the wider community

• those who can make changes happen: managers of appropriate partner organisations / agencies; service planners and commissioners.

What is involved in doing needs assessment?

There is no single best way of assessing the needs of a particular target population in a local area. The methods that you use will be completely dependent upon who your target population is, and what you want to find out about that population. So, before beginning to do a needs assessment, it is very important to be clear about what you want to measure, and for whom you want to measure it.

There are two approaches to needs assessment.

• The first approach establishes the needs of the target population solely on the basis of consultation with users and service providers, without any prior assumptions about what those needs might be.

• The second approach assumes, on the basis of other available information, that there is a need, and then tries to determine the best ways of meeting that need among the people who have it.

The box below gives some examples of how these approaches differ. Both approaches are useful, and it may be necessary to use one or the other at different times.

The methods you use for your needs assessment will depend on the approach you take. For example, you would use different methods if you wanted to find out about the needs for child care by female drug users in your area, than if you wanted to find out about the treatment needs of psychostimulant users in your area. Similarly, if you want to find out about the physical and mental health needs of homeless drug users, you would approach the problem in a different way than if you wanted to find out about the needs for information and support by the families of drug users in your area.

If you make your question as specific and focused as possible, you will be in a better position to choose the most suitable methods for answering the question.

Whilst the needs of your target population, not service providers, should be the primary focus of a needs assessment, much of the information gathered in the needs assessment will come from existing services. In addition, part of the process should involve the profiling of existing services to find out, among other things, where they are located, who their clients are, and what their current capacity is.

The Components of Needs Assessment

The process of needs assessment should ordinarily involve the following components:

• a review of the existing sources of information relevant to your target population

• a profile of existing services and description of client profile

• the views of your target population

• the views of relevant practitioners and service providers

• analysis and interpretation of the results in order to draw conclusions

• taking action through prioritising the identified needs, appraising the options for meeting those needs, and implementing an action plan including allocation of resources.

• monitoring and evaluation to check that the changes you have implemented are having the desired effect of meeting the needs of your target population.

In the following chapters we discuss each of these components in more detail and, where appropriate, illustrate them with the example of the Ardach Health Centre in Morayshire.

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