Community Health Volunteer's Training Manual - Population Council

Unit 1
Developing a Community Profile
Introduction
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To be able to mobilise the community effectively, there are certain important things you
need to know about the community. They include the disease profile of the community, the
location of community land marks and the health status of the community. This information
will help you to know what resources you have in the community and how to plan for them.
The baseline survey will also help you assess the initial health status of the community at
your point of entry and the changes overtime. Unit 3 will also help you identify community
resources, where they are located and how they should be utilised.
Unit Objectives Unit Topics
By the end of this unit the volunteers will be able to:
1. Explain basic data management concepts
2. Define community profile
3. Assist communities to draw a community map
4. Compile a community demographic register
5. Conduct a Baseline Survey
Keywords and phrases:
profile, mapping, baseline, register, survey, data, information
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Concept in data management
Definition of Community Profile
Community Mapping
Compiling a Community Demographic
Register
Conducting a Baseline Survey
Topic 1 Concepts in data management
Do you know the number of school children in your community? What about the number
of women who delivered in your community last year? Do you know how many pregnant
women died in your community last year? How many refuse sites are in your community?
We will discuss how to get information. We shall also learn how to count, look, observe and
write down this information. But first we need to understand some words that are used in
data management.
Data and information
The word “data” is plural, and is derived from the Latin word “datum”. Data means raw fact.
Data may be expressed as numbers, text, image or sound. For example, “city”, “300,000
people” and “Takoradi” are all data. By itself data might not mean much. In order to
understand data, it has to be arranged or processed into information. To illustrate the
difference, if the data above are organised in a certain way we may have: “Takoradi is a city
with 300,000 people”. This is information. You may realise that when organised this way you
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