Temple University Hospital’s 2025 Community Health Needs Assessment Offers a Resource for Local Service Planning
Temple University Hospital’s newly released 2025 Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) provides a detailed picture of health and social needs across the communities it serves in Philadelphia. Developed as part of a broader Southeastern Pennsylvania regional assessment, the report combines more than 70 health indicators with surveys, focus groups, youth engagement, and interviews with community and organizational stakeholders. It identifies priorities ranging from mental health access, substance use, housing, food access, and healthcare navigation to neighborhood conditions and youth gun violence. Notably, gun violence was identified as one of the priority concerns for youth, alongside mental health, substance use, bullying, and lack of knowledge about available resources.
For CVI organizations and other local service providers, CHNAs can be valuable planning tools because they provide localized information that organizations may not have the resources to collect themselves. Temple’s community health assessment includes community perspectives, neighborhood-level information, identified service gaps, and potential solutions that can help organizations refine program models, strengthen referrals and partnerships, support grant applications, and assess whether their services align with community priorities. The report itself notes that CHNA data are intended to support nonprofits and community-serving organizations in program development, grant writing, and evaluation. For organizations working with young people at high risk of violence, the assessment is especially useful because it places violence alongside related needs such as trauma, behavioral health, housing, substance use, and access to trusted resources—reinforcing the importance of planning services around the full range of needs participants may face.