COMMUNITY HEALTH ASSESSMENT BEGINS

Before a community can be healthy, it has to decide what health is, and that's what the Healthy Community Committee set out to do Thursday.

Jeff Krantz of the Community Caring Council urged people at Thursday's kickoff event to "open your eyes, your hearts and your minds to the potential this county has" for addressing the health of its residents.

The Healthy Community Committee is a joint effort of several organizations concerned about county's health issues.

Krantz said the committee will sponsor a series of community meetings after Jan. 1.

Committee members will hold an educational meeting on Nov. 14, county health center director Charlotte Craig said. The meeting will start at 6 p.m. at the Cape Girardeau Salvation Army building.

Craig said the committee plans to study what health services the county has and what it needs.

More and more communities are studying their health-care needs, said Mark Scovill, program manager for a community health data collection and analysis group.

Scovill said health-care reform is "pretty well dead" in Washington, "but that has not stopped health care reform. It is being done all across the country at the community level."

The assessment process is made up of several steps, he said, starting with identifying what resources communities have and in combining some services.

Any plan to address gaps in a community's health resources requires a unique approach and focus on that community, Scovill said. "It's their health that we're talking about," and someone shouldn't come in and mandate what needs to be done.

The assessment process asks "some very basic questions," he said, but the answers aren't always simple. For example, in a community where high infant mortality is a problem, the cause of that problem could be a low birth weight, which could in turn be caused by a high rate of teen pregnancy. Factors contributing to high rates of teen pregnancy, in turn, include a host of socioeconomic, values and educational issues a community could choose to study.

"The higher upstream you intervene, the lower the death rate," Scovill said. "This is leverage. Businessmen have known about leverage for a long time. This is public health care leverage."

Scovill cited a San Francisco survey in which residents listed the most important factor for a healthy community as a low crime rate. Other non-medical factors included things like low rates of child abuse and being a good place to raise children. Availability of health care was "about halfway down the list," he said.

Other factors that need to be considered are "quality of life issues," including availability of cultural resources, income, social environment and a population's feeling of empowerment within its community, he said.

Participants broke into discussion groups to identify what they thought were key issues in the county's health profile. Issues identified included access to health care, particularly for Medicare and Medicaid patients, teen pregnancy, awareness of health issues and resources available, breakdown in family structures and values and prevention issues.

Participants were given puzzle pieces to bring to the meeting, and those pieces were then to be assembled to create "a picture of health" in the community.

Health assessment "is a puzzle and it will fall into place," Craig told participants. "The idea was that you all will make a complete picture if you will make your presence known."

The Healthy Community Committee membership consists of caring council, the Cape Girardeau Chamber of Commerce, the county area medical society, the county public health center, St. Francis Medical Center, Southeast Missouri Hospital and Southeast Missouri State University.