Local Healthcare organizations are constantly providing new services for the community, but doing so requires help from the community itself.
The Morgan County Health Department’s Dale Bainter joined our WLDS’ AM Conversation to discuss what they call the “Community Health Needs Assessment.”
Bainter tells us that this assessment is in partnership with Passavant Area Hospital.
“The Morgan County Health Department is tasked with doing a Community Health Needs Assessment every five years, and recently, over the last decade, Passavant Area Hospital has also been tasked with doing a Community Health Needs Assessment every three years. We’ve combined our forces, being the two largest providers in the community. We get together and development a plan for first, finding the needs of our community, we bring community partners together, we have multiple meetings about it, and we’re getting close to the stage where we’re going to send out a survey into the community,” Bainter says.
He also tells us some of the things that have come out of this partnership and assessment.
“Some of the projects that have come from this in the past are: our primary care federally qualified health center in the health department, the STD clinic at the health department, Walking for Wellness, the mental health services provided at Passavant Hospital was driven by this. So it’s a process where we get together, we survey the community and we say, ‘what can we do better?'” says Bainter.
Bainter explains what we as community member can do to help the Health Department and Hospital with this assessment.
“In the coming weeks, you’re going to start to see a survey come out. It was developed by ourselves and Passavant, we also used UIS in Springfield. We’ll be distributing those out through social media, they’ll be available at the hospital, at the health department and multiple agencies around the community. It’s a very brief survey, we need as much buy-in as possible, there’s a small gap in there in case we missed something you can write something in. Just fill that survey out, and then we’ll be tallying those surveys to see what the community thinks is our biggest need,” Bainter explains.
To hear more from Bainter and the Community Health Needs Assessment, check out our full interview with him under the “Newscasts” tab right here on our website.