GROUP WORKS TO IMPROVE HEALTH, LIFE QUALITY HERE

After a town hall meeting Tuesday, members of the Healthier Communities Committee will start trying to identify priority health issues in Cape Girardeau County.

Tuesday's meeting, which starts at 7 p.m. at the First Baptist Church activity center, 926 Broadway in Cape Girardeau, will be the last in a series of meetings in which committee members have garnered public input about health and quality of life concerns in Cape Girardeau.

It's important that residents make their concerns known, said Charlotte Craig, administrator of the Cape Girardeau County Public Health Center and a member of the Healthier Communities Committee.

"We know that Cape County residents have good, workable ideas about what would make their communities better," she said. "Whether it's the establishment of a teen center, a countywide bus service, access to primary health care for the family, projects to help prevent teen pregnancy -- whatever is on the minds of our residents, we want to know. We need to know so that we can select a project that hopefully will benefit everyone."

Issues identified so far include a need to reinforce family values; substance abuse; the need for affordable, accessible health care; and the need for countywide transportation.

"We've basically collected anecdotal information, what you might call secondary soft data, so far," said committee member Jeff Krantz, director of planning for Southeast Missouri Hospital.

After compiling that information, Krantz said, committee members will "try to prioritize some of the issues against some hard data, statistics, and try to determine which issues are truly problems, which are priorities or significant, which are somewhere that we can make an impact in the community."

For example, he said, the need for stronger family values has been identified as a concern, "but can I necessarily build that up or change that in the next 36 months or whatever? There are going to be some things that we can hopefully make an impact on and others we can work toward."

Committee members will identify a project "or three or five for this next year," and try to recruit volunteers -- including civic and community organizations and clubs -- to adopt those projects, Krantz said.

"It may be something as simple as providing transportation once a week for kids to get immunized," he said.

But Craig said all the project planning in the world won't do any good if the community doesn't participate.

"We can't do for the community what they won't do for themselves," she said. "The community has to become involved in the solution to their problems. We can't solve them all."

The Healthier Communities Committee was established last year in response to a statewide call for the creation of community health partnerships through the Community Health Assessment Resource Team (CHART).

Participating agencies are the Cape Girardeau Chamber of Commerce, the Cape Girardeau County Area Medical Society, the Cape County Public Health Center, the Caring Communities Council, Southeast Missouri Hospital, St. Francis Medical Center and Southeast Missouri State University.