What does your community want?

Before we make a plan for improving healthcare in our communities, we need to consider the perspective of community members. It’s easy to assume that our perspectives on the community’s needs are correct, but this can lead to big errors and wasted effort, time, and money. Even worse, when we assume the role of expert or savior we can victimize the communities we are trying to serve. Instead, we should ask non-leading questions and try to find the community voice. This assignment attempts to do that in the form of a community survey.

1. Begin by determining how you will find people to survey. Most of you will use a convenience sample (this means choosing a population because it is convenient for you to access). 

• Some examples are: 
  • Send out an online/text survey
  • Post a link via social media
    • Parents’ groups often receive high traffic and generate many responses
  • Collaborate with a local childbirth educator, yoga instructor, ob/gyn clinic, etc. to survey their clients

2. Develop your survey using google forms or a similar platform. Many platforms will generate pie charts and bar graphs for you which can be very helpful in your final presentation. 

• Create an opening paragraph to provide background info for your participants including: 
  • Description of nurse-midwife role:
    • Education/background
    • Scope of practice:
      • Gynecologic and reproductive healthcare throughout the lifespan
  • Potential practice settings
  • Pertinent local maternal-child health indicator AND health disparity data from your state or community (from assignment 7)
• The survey should be 10-15 questions long
• Include demographic data, so you know if your population is representative of the community population: 
  • Age range
  • Race/ethnicity
  • Whether the participant lives in the community (especially important for online surveys)
• Ask at least 3 questions related to specific issues within this community (access to care, health disparities, etc)
• At least one question should be open-ended
• At least 20 responses should be recorded, there is no maximum!
• Write questions based on the data you learned in assignment 7 and your potential practice plans. Here are some suggestions:
  • What types of health services does our community need?
  • How interested are you in seeing a nurse-midwife for care? 
  • Have you ever experienced discrimination in healthcare?
  • Avoid yes/no questions unless absolutely necessary; instead, write questions in 1-5 Likert style

3. Compile survey results into this template. This will allow your reader to identify how many people gave each response. For this assignment, the results will all be displayed in table form.  Save the pie charts or bar graphs your survey platform may have created, they are perfect for your final presentation slides!

4. Turn in to the drop box this template with the following components:

1. A copy of your survey
   • Save your survey as a PDF by selecting “print” from the menu in the top right of the survey screen. Then select “save as PDF” in the destination field. This will save your survey to your computer as a PDF document. 
2. Survey response tables
3. What did you learn from this assignment that will help you to build a practice that meets the needs of your community?