The following outline contains the basic content areas to include in an epidemiological profile:
Cover Page
Acknowledgements
- List members of your epidemiological workgroup, advisory council, evidence-based program workgroup, and any other key stakeholders.
Table of Contents
Executive Summary
- Provide a brief overview of what the epidemiological profile is, why it is important, and how it can be used.
- Provide a brief list of key findings from the profile.
Introduction
- Describe your community. Consider including demographic information such as population size, age distribution, gender, and any socioeconomic background information that may be available (e.g., educational attainment, employment, etc.).
- Include important historical, cultural, and contextual information that might be relevant to the data included in the profile.
- Consider describing your SPF-SIG project. Describe the Strategic Prevention Framework and how developing an epidemiological profile is a component of the assessment step.
- Describe you epidemiological workgroup. This can include the number of members, agencies, organizations they represent; how often they meet; where they meet; and any other information an interested reader may want to know.
Data Selection Processes
- Describe how you collected or gathered the data included in the profile.
- Discuss how your workgroup decided which data sources to include in the profile and which data sources to leave out.
- Provide a list of data sources, describing each source. Examples include a youth tobacco survey, emergency room data from the local hospital, alcohol-related motor vehicle crash data from local law enforcement, and community perceptions collected during a focus group. For each data source, include:
- A brief description of the data source.
- The department, agency, or organization that provided the data.
- How frequently the data are collected and the years data are available for.
- Any limitations of the data (e.g., a small survey response, or perhaps that arrest data don’t include arrests of community members occurring outside of the community).
- Provide a list of indictors, such as "Past 30-day Alcohol Use Among Adults" or "Number of Lung Cancer Deaths."
Data Dimensions
Describe the criteria you need to prioritize substance abuse problems. These might include:
- Size/Magnitude
- Trends over time
- Relative comparisons (e.g., one community to another, one age group to another)
- Seriousness/Severity
- Economic Cost
Body of Report (Findings)
This may include narrative, tables, graphs, charts and maps. It is also helpful to incorporate a combination of formats (e.g., use narrative to summarize findings in a table.) Make sure that tables and graphs are clearly labeled.
- Alcohol
- Consumption/use indicators
- Consequence indicators
- Risk and protective factors
- Tobacco
- Consumption/use indicators
- Consequence indicators
- Risk and protective factors
- Drugs
- Consumption/use indicators
- Consequence indicators
- Risk and protective factors
Limitations and Data Gaps
- Discuss indicators for which you do not have data and consider including strategies or plans for addressing those data gaps.
- Discuss limitations of the data you do have (e.g., maybe you have data that you cannot sort by gender or by age group)
Conclusion
Appendices, which might include:
- Names of State Epidemiological Workgroup members
- Data collection instruments used
- Large, detailed tables
- Glossary of terms
- Mortality or hospitalization data: ICD-9/ICD-10 codes (If the tribe uses these data sources)
Developed under the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) Center for the Application of Prevention Technologies contract. Reference #HHSS277200800004C. For training and/or technical assistance purposes only.