Webinar - Data Collection during COVID-19 - Part 1: Best Practices, Challenges, and Solutions

Part 1: Conducting Needs Assessments in Virtual Environment: Best Practices, Challenges, and Solutions

Webinar Date: May 26, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced prevention professionals to move their work into a virtual environment, creating numerous challenges including data collection. The first webinar of this three-part webinar series on collecting data online during a public health emergency will revisit the Strategic Prevention Framework’s (SPF) Step 1: Needs Assessment and describe its increased value during a public health emergency. We will explore general best practices for conducting needs assessments, and discuss methods and resources to support ongoing needs assessment given the current challenging environment, as well as strategies to sustain online data collection beyond the COVID-19 pandemic where it may be preferred than traditional in-person methods in some instances.

Audience

Community, tribal, jurisdiction, and state-level prevention practitioners and allied health partners and community members located in the Pacific Southwest states and jurisdictions of American Samoa, Arizona, California, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Guam, Hawaii, Nevada, Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau.

Presenter

Dr. Sandeep Kasat, MBBS, MPH, is a senior epidemiologist at Westat with over 15 years of experience in behavioral health epidemiology, especially as it relates to substance abuse, and using epidemiological data in strategic planning, and decision-making. He leads data analysis and dissemination activities on several projects at Westat. As former director of epidemiology on the Center for the Application of Prevention Technologies (CAPT) training and technical assistance contract, he has assisted all CSAP-funded states, jurisdictions, and tribes in using and analyzing data to highlight disparities and at-risk populations, create data-guided plans, select evidence-based strategies, inform policy and decision-making, and monitor and evaluate results to assess progress.