Needs Assessment
Identifying the educational needs of the target audience.
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Whenever content is developed for an event or session, it is
essential to determine who the target audience is. What is even
more critical is determining the target audience's educational
needs. Uncovering these needs can be done using need
assessments.
Needs assessment consists of identifying perceived and
unperceived needs, which can be discovered by collecting data from
a number of sources. The methods used to gather data is often
dependent on the target audience and subject matter. Below are
suggested sources that can be used or developed to assess the
target audience's perceived and unperceived needs.
Needs Assessment Sources
Perceived
- Planning committee members
- Surveys
- Questionnaires
- Focus Groups
- Requests from the target audience
Unperceived
- Self- assessment tests
- Chart audits
- Chart stimulated recall interviews
- Direct observation of practice performance
- Quality assurance data from hospitals, regions
- Standardized patients
- Provincial databases
- Incident reports
- Published literature (RCT, cohort studies)
