10.3.4  Basic questions to ask in a community survey

The responses to questionnaires, interviews and focus groups in your community will help you to understand and tackle the priority health problems locally. Questions that relate to these problems might include:

• What are the most important health needs of different groups of people in your community? It is important to establish these health needs from the point of view of people living in your community, as well as the needs expressed by health professionals. Your community survey can be seen as a form of health needs assessment.
• Does the current set of health interventions cover these needs? Are the interventions acceptable to local people in terms of culture and cost, especially to the poorer members of the society? Are the interventions provided as cost-effectively as possible?
• Given the resources available, could your health service cover more needs, or more people, in a more cost-effective way?
• Is it possible to better control the environmental factors that influence health and healthcare? Can other sectors help (education, water, agriculture, public works/roads, etc.)?

Information collected through health research help these questions to be answered better. That is why research is done and why you will be doing a community survey of your own when you have completed your training and are deployed to a kebele. After you have completed your community survey and analysed the results, it will probably raise questions in your mind about the reasons for certain health problems and what you could do about them. One way of finding the answers is to conduct small-scale health research projects, to investigate health-related problems in your community more closely, and to see whether the results help in finding better solutions.