Community diagnosis and health action: a manual for tropical and rural areas.

Abstract

As the interest of medical schools in developing countries moves towards the use of community health centres in providing much of the health care for the majority of the population, the need becomes apparent for training in the techniques of research, analysis and diagnosis of the major community health problems in rural and urban areas in the tropics. This book seeks to provide a concise and practical guide to these techniques of community diagnosis. Section I is an overview of community diagnosis - what it is and how it is done. In Section II, each of ten chapters describes the methods of and approaches to obtaining necessary information. Section III describes the analytical process that follows diagnosis. The details of a special type of survey are given in Section IV, with a chapter on statistical methods and the uses of community diagnosis for training.