The relevance of rapid assessment to health research and interventions

This article highlights disease control problems and problems hampering multidisciplinary reasearch. Traditional social science and epidemiological methods are often too time-consuming to address the immediate and urgent needs of disease control programmes therefore rapid assessment methods to provide information on health status, health impact, health services and health behaviour are essential. A distinction is made between the efficacy of disease control tools and community effectiveness, emphasising the potential for rapid assessment to improve community effectiveness. The article describes the development and validation of rapid assessments and techniques.