ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the need for obtaining the voice of the community before embarking on any health delivery improvements. For any community health improvement coalition to be a success, it must understand the community members, the culture they live in, adherence to food traditions, age profile, economic disadvantages, their beliefs, and their opinions about the health issue that the coalition is trying to improve. The coalition needs to have partners who work and deliver services in the community in order to make a community profile. Often community partners deal with small segments of the community and because their services are specialized, they may not know or understand the whole community. The coalition should undertake the effort to enhance its knowledge of the community by doing some community focus groups, telephone interviews, person-to-person questionnaires, facilitated community conversations with prepared directed questions, canvasing of the most prone areas to get firsthand information, and leaving questionnaires at community gathering places or at community meetings that can be mailed back to the coalition. The goal of gathering the voice of the community is to understand what they expect, want, and need. Understanding these expectations, wants, and needs helps the coalition come up with solutions that will be accepted by the community. The use of a Kano Model and Voice of the Customer Table to help a coalition to analyze the data collected will also be discussed.
