Addressing Needs: What Do Our Clients, Staff, and Community Need?

Ongoing assessment of the needs of clients, staff, and their wider communities is essential if our policies, services, and practices are to remain fit for purpose. Needs can vary and priorities can shift rapidly in response to an emerging issue. Identifying and prioritizing conflicting needs is an ongoing challenge within policy, service delivery, and practice. A needs analysis can assist with this task as it explores in a systematic way deficiencies and problems and it can help identify causes and solutions. Within this chapter we provide key principles to consider when addressing needs. We present an overarching framework for defining your problem statement and addressing the related needs. This is followed by a step-by-step description of how to use the framework. Finally, two case studies are presented as examples. These explore the needs of people who are in recovery and are facing homelessness and people who use alcohol and are accessing newly developed integrated alcohol treatment services.