One of the factors that often frustrates both patients and care providers is a disjointed system -- one in which a primary care doctor handles some aspects of a person’s well-being, while another provider, such as a mental health professional, takes care of another aspect of that person’s wellness. That’s where integrated care comes in.
The CHNA has been instrumental to ongoing substance misuse prevention work in the Blue Hills region, offering both financial and organizational support to various initiatives over the years. In this post, we highlight several ongoing prevention projects and initiatives in our area.
While health care typically deals mainly with diagnosing and treating disease, public health looks at trying to improve a broad spectrum of outcomes related to health and well-being -- ideally, preventing health problems from developing in the first place. That’s the basic idea behind prevention strategies, which can be understood as three types of measures: Primary, Secondary and Tertiary.
Designed for use by prevention strategists, the Strategic Prevention Framework provides a comprehensive set of steps and guiding principles for creating effective, sustainable approaches to improving community behavioral health -- specifically in the areas of preventing substance use and misuse.
We believe that the path to sustainable positive change for the health of our communities lies in multi-sector, collaborative, interdisciplinary efforts that address the root causes of public health inequities rather than treating the symptoms. TRIC’s mission of supporting cooperative planning across municipalities, and doing so within a framework that considers how decisions made in one community will affect the neighboring towns and cities, is a strong example of the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration we have pledged to expand in the Blue Hills.
Community Engagement sounds like a straightforward practice. On the surface, it’s simple: To do work that impacts a community, it’s generally best to involve the members of that community in the work being done. But true engagement is much deeper and more complex than just “involvement.” In fact, when done well, community engagement may be one of the more complicated aspects of any public health initiative.
Social Determinants of Health are the conditions in the places where people live, learn, work, and play that impact health and well-being. They affect people’s health and well-being in a wide variety of ways, and they’re key drivers of health inequities -- the unfair differences in health status or access to health resources between different groups of people.
In 2018, the Town of Randolph partnered with the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) to generate a town-wide community health needs assessment. In order to fully engage in a comprehensive planning and data analysis process, the Town of Randolph convened a Steering Committee to guide the needs assessment and resulting Community Wellness Plan. CHNA 20 was invited to participate, and has taken an active role on the Steering Committee since its inception.
A CHA or CHNA (not to be confused with a Community Health Network Alliance, like CHNA 20!) is a systematic examination and analysis of the key health issues and assets in a community.
In other words, it’s a way of researching and learning about what makes people in a community healthier or less healthy.
The GSSBHC provides a safety net that links behavioral health service providers across the region, so that the most vulnerable residents who are most likely to slip through the cracks can receive needed support and services.