It has almost been a year since the Central Michigan District Health Department won third place in the Public Health Foundation’s (PHF) 2012 “I’m Your Community Guide!” Contest. I am writing this to reflect on how we were able to utilize The Guide to Community Guide for Preventive Services (The Community Guide) to secure funding and start making the changes necessary to improve the health status of our community. I hope our story will help to inspire others’ use of The Community Guide.

 

Imagine being a local public health director and receiving the call from the County Health Rankings representative that your county ranked last – or the least healthy – in Michigan. I received that call in the spring of 2010 and although I was not surprised, I knew it would be my responsibility to do something about it. 

 

Where to start? As a health department we didn’t have any funding for new programs or media campaigns. We didn’t have a community health assessment process started, but knew we needed to start one. So we began by asking for help! We asked community partners to come to a public health summit and share their ideas on how we could improve in the Rankings. We asked healthcare systems to pay for a facilitator for the assessment and improvement process. We requested interns from local colleges and universities who worked for free in exchange for college credit. A few months later I was honored to attend the National Health Policy Forum meeting to talk about what we were doing as a result of the County Health Rankings. It was at that meeting that I first learned of The Community Guide.  It was an aha moment for me! How could I have been in public health for 22 years and NOT know about this amazing resource?

 

Did I mention we didn’t have any funding? However, what we did have was the newly formed Together We Can Health Improvement Council comprised of 38 community organizations that came together to improve the health status within our community. Using the County Health Rankings as our call to action, Together We Can began to assess the health problems in our community and then began the process to create a community health improvement plan. We utilized the skills of one of our interns to create a crosswalk to illustrate what topic areas within The Community Guide could be utilized in the plan to address the 8 priority health issues listed here:

The Community Guide proved to be a valuable tool in the process. In today’s world we have access to an incredible number of programs, methods and interventions to improve health status. I continue to receive at least five communications a day with options, ideas, case studies, and theories on how to improve the health of the residents within the central Michigan area.  However with a strong community commitment and work ethic we wanted to make sure we utilized evidence-based programs and processes that were proven to work. 

 

We held our second Public Health Summit in the spring of 2011 and had 110 community members in attendance. During the Summit we provided the participants with a set of evidence-based programs and policies taken from The Community Guide and asked them to tell us which ones they believed would work in the central Michigan area. Community endorsement and recommendations were important, because even though the examples were evidence-based, we wanted to confirm which ones the community believed would work. The experience and discussion yielded excellent results! Within the next six months we were able to create and publish our community health improvement plan.  Because The Community Guide provided such a concise template for interventions, the action plan portion of the plan was developed relatively quickly.  Evidence-based strategies incorporated into our 2012 plan include:

In April 2012, we launched our community health improvement plan complete with evidence-based interventions. During the summer of 2012 two of my colleagues and I wrote a successful Community Transformation Grant Designed for Small Communities and were awarded $1.6 million to implement the evidence-based interventions we identified in our plan related to nutrition, physical activity, and smoking cessation. Because we had done the work to learn and explore the information and interventions contained in The Community Guide, we knew where to look and how to include them in the application rather than needing to spend significant time learning about it. Having a comprehensive community health improvement plan with evidence-based strategies outlined in The Community Guide was one of the strengths identified in our application.   

 

We FINALLY have funding. Now together we can make system, policy and infrastructure changes which will improve the health status of our community!

 

For more information on our work with The Community Guide please visit the Together We Can/County Health Rankings on the Central Michigan District Health Department’s website. 

 

Has your organization also used The Community Guide to improve health outcomes in your community?  Email your story to [email protected].