Community Assessment for Diagnosis and Determination of Health-related Problems in Aliny Village Meshginshahr functions in Ardebil

understanding the real needs of a community is necessary for planning towards improvement and solving the problems of the community. In most cases, there is a gap between the needs identified by the public authorities and the needs considered by people. One of the best ways to reduce this gap is community assessment which is recognition, maintenance, and mobilization of resources for creating and achieving a shared vision of the community. This study was conducted in Aliny village which is located in Meshkin-shahr city in Ardabil Province using North Carolina 8-stage model and the model which has been developed in health school of the Tehran University of Medical Sciences. The study identified a range of problems and which were prioritized in the following order: Unemployment, psychological disorder and depression, drug abuse and addiction, marriage at an early age, no proper roads, inadequate waste disposal and sewage systems, high blood pressure, lack of drinking water and water outage in summer, shortage of water resources for agriculture, insufficient water dams, lack of cooperation from the authorities to grant loans to create jobs. Finally, a program for decreasing the unemployment in Aliny village was developed. This study showed that the investigated community has a wide range of social, economical, cultural and health problems and community assessment model is an efficient method for recognition of the community problems.