The CHNA is a collection of data from community surveys, focus groups, and health stats that helps pin down the medical, social, and economic determinants of the community’s overall health.
The findings from the assessment are used to formulate the Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP), as well as the State of the County Health Report. Some past priorities included access to healthcare, food and water, housing, and quality education.
Director of HHS Jonathan Campbell, led the discussion and had the participants identify demographics within the community whose needs get overlooked.
“There's a lot of different data sets that you can look at and you can point to,” Campbell said. “You could say, ‘diabetes, it's a leading cause of death, cancer’s [a] leading cause of death.’ So we may jump to saying those should be priorities for our community. However, what that misses out on is the true community feel.”
Campbell pointed to the Hispanic, Black, LGBTQ, unsheltered, and veteran populations as some of the key focus groups to include in the assessment.
Others who were in attendance, like the Director of the Resiliency Task Force, Jvanete Skiba, and Chief District Court Judge J. Corpening, brought up youth affected by Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and families impacted by gun violence.
President and CEO of Wilmington Downtown, Incorporated, Christina Haley, questioned why the participants' purview was so limited.
“Why are we [focusing on] the Hispanic and Black as the only… I mean, obviously our community is more than just White, Hispanic or Black, like, why don't we include other races or other cultures, like Muslim, Jewish cultures, and I don't know how to divide that out,” Haley said. “I know that maybe this is because these are the top majority of what we see in New Hanover County. Maybe by focusing on the refugee component we reach the Muslim and Jewish populations.”
To Haley’s point, Campbell agreed that in some cases these populations may overlap.
“So we may be able to capture that,” Campbell said. “We're certainly not trying to eliminate anyone's voice. We want this community health needs assessment to really be a voice of the community, but we do know there will be limitations.”
Campbell said there are still many voices to consider and that this meeting only marked the kickoff of a months-long strategy:
“We are going to be investing in an opportunity of bringing together all of the subject matter experts in your respective area to find ways that we can take data that you have, populations that you work with, and ensure that we are listening and hearing what those populations have to say, and match that up with other data that exists, and then develop some priority areas that we can all focus on as a community over the next several years.”
The Community Assessment meetings are open to the public, and HSS welcomes voices from all facets of the community to come be heard. The next meeting will be in April to discuss the next steps.
