Community Health Assessment Process in Mesa County

Spotlight on Scholars in Public Health Practice: 
Mesa County Health Department

Earlier this year, the Center for Public Health Practice of the Colorado School of Public Health solicited proposals from individuals working in any aspect of public health in Colorado for financial support for a 12 month project. The funding for these projects was sponsored by the Colorado Health Foundation. The general purpose of this fellowship is to support Scholars to create novel and useful products, as well as to provide academic enrichment  for those working in public health fields in Colorado to enhance their professional work.  Mesa County Health Department’s proposal to address their “Community Health Assessment and Community Health Improvement Plan” was selected as one of the Scholars in Public Health Practice awards. A portion of the project manager’s salary was supported with this award.  Project personnel are Brenda McKay, MBA, Jeff Kuhr, PhD, Kristy Emerson, MPH, Greg Rajnowski, MA, Shane Chatfield, BS and Tamara Capp, BA. For more information about Mesa County Health Department, contact Brenda McKay at Brenda.McKay@mesacounty.us .

Story by Brenda McKay, MBA
Mesa County Health Department, Preparedness and Planning Division

The Health Informatics program was formed to address health information, data, and health technology integration at the Mesa County Health Department (MCHD). This team is currently leading the 2011 Mesa County Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) that involves community healthcare partners at the Steering Committee and Focus Group levels. The Health Informatics team will also be involved in integration of health department information, data sets, and assessment tools, including the development of a data inventory system that will help to define data sharing practices at the health department. This process has intensified existing partnerships and provided new opportunities for data sharing and collaboration in the area of community assessment.

Stakeholders were engaged early on in the process (April 2011) to identify agency assessments, provide recommendations for planning, and to begin selecting individuals for participation in the Steering Committee. Part of this process was to gather County and State level data and compared it, when appropriate, to the Healthy People 2020 benchmarks. The first round of data gathering resulted in a consumable document that is located on http://www.mesahealth.org.  

In late July 2011, a complete planning team was formed to develop a process for how the data would be integrated in to the public health improvement plan process. MCHD has merged many of the recommended models like the NACCHO-MAPP[1]and the CDPHE Office of Planning and Partnerships-CHAPS[2],and research-based approaches like PRECEDE-PROCEED (Green & Kreuter, 2005)[3]to addressing public health improvement planning into a community health assessment model that aligns the key elements of each. Vital to the overall process was gaining input at key levels: Steering Committee, Content Focus Groups, Providers and Subject Matter Experts (SME), and Clients.

A unique approach to prioritization was tried with this year’s process. The Steering Committee was asked to review the data and information from each Priority Area “one-pager”. Using this information they were then asked to score each area for Actionability and Importance. The score-sheets were entered into a spreadsheet which auto-generated graphs that were then displayed within minutes of the prioritization session. The Steering Committee then arrived at 6 community health priority areas after reviewing the prioritization results:

• Tobacco Use
• Maternal and Child Health
• Mental Health
• Obesity
• Family Abuse and Violence
• Screening and Early Detection

Following this step, the Steering Committee and other stakeholders were asked to make recommendations for Provider/SME focus group participants that would be used to gather further information regarding the health priority areas, general demographic and social determinants data, and participants for the community and client-based focus groups. Updates at key stages in this process are being sent via MailChimpto the Steering Committee and stakeholders. The cumulative results of the focus group information will be shared with the Steering Committee sometime in January 2012 to determine strategies and goals for integration into the MCHD Public Health Improvement Plan.

The CHNA Steering Committee will continue to be used, in part, as a core agency partnership that will be invested in annually in order to review data and information required for reporting, prioritization, and program evaluation of community health efforts. Continued efforts are being made to reach beyond the assessment process to address inter-agency data collection, review and evaluation issues.

New opportunities for MCHD have developed, as a result of this process, to partner with community stakeholders to complete agency-based health assessment reports which summarize the community health data and priorities in terms of the agency’s strategic planning objectives. This information will be used in non-profit agency reporting for IRS compliance (hospitals), Centers for Medicaid and Medicare regulations for local services planning (school district) and prioritization for community funding (United Way).