Designing Trauma-Sensitive, Asset-Based Health Needs Assessments

Traditional Health Needs Assessments (HNAs) often rely on deficit-based biomedical models that pathologise underserved communities and risk exacerbating institutional trauma. This practice session introduces a transformative framework for designing place-based HNAs centered on Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) and salutogenesis.

Participants will explore methodologies for achieving knowledge equity, ensuring that experiential "lived experience" is weighted equally with data to combat epistemic injustice. A critical focus will be placed on the welfare-enforcement boundary, teaching practitioners how to establish "sanctuary spaces" and data firewalls that decouple public health from punitive policing.

Through the lens of the Ewen Framework (2025), attendees will learn to transition from top-down consultation to democratic co-research models. By mapping individual, social, and physical assets, participants will gain practical advice to design assessments that foster collective agency, mitigate structural vulnerability, and prioritise authentic "health creation".