MOUNT GILEAD — The Morrow County Community Partners including the Morrow County hospital, Morrow County Health District, Delaware-Morrow Mental Health and Recovery Board, schools, and many other agencies will continue to survey Morrow County residents as part of a community health assessment process.
A community health assessment (sometimes called a CHA), also known as community health needs assessment (sometimes called a CHNA), refers to a state, tribal, local, or territorial health assessment that identifies key health needs and issues through systematic, comprehensive data collection and analysis.
It is a systematic assessment of population health in Morrow County including indicators reflecting health behaviors, health conditions, health care factors, and social and environmental determinants of health.
Community health assessments use such principles as:
• Multi-sector partnerships that support shared ownership of all phases of community health improvement, including assessment, planning, investment, implementation, and evaluation;
• Proactive, broad and diverse community engagement to improve results;
• A definition of community that encompasses both a significant enough area to allow for population-wide interventions and measurable results, and includes a targeted focus to address disparities among subpopulations;
• Maximum transparency to improve community engagement and accountability;
• Use of evidence-based interventions and encouragement of innovative practices with thorough evaluation;
• Evaluation to inform a continuous improvement process; and
• Use of the highest quality data pooled from, and shared among, diverse public and private sources.
The Morrow County Community Partners are working closely with the Hospital Council of Northwest Ohio and researchers at the University of Toledo to conduct the survey. 1,200 Morrow County residents ages 19 and older were randomly selected to participate in a survey.
The anonymous survey asks participants to answer questions about general health, risk and protective health factors, and access to health care. These answers will create a snapshot of the health of Morrow County adults. The results will guide many public and private agencies in their program planning over the next several years by identifying key health problems.
The final community health assessment report will be published in the fall of 2019 at which time the results will be used to prioritize needs and create a community health improvement plan.
The Morrow County Community Partners is composed of many public and private agencies that make up the public health system. The partners include: Morrow County Hospital, Morrow County Health District, Delaware-Morrow Mental Health and Recovery Board, School districts, Helpline, MCTC, Job and Family Services, Morrow Family Health Center, Family Children First Council and others.
The Morrow County Partners ask you, the residents of Morrow County who were randomly selected, to complete and return the survey. Your assistance is needed to determine the many issues that you feel need to be addressed within the county, a news release states.
