The Marshall County Health Department (MCHD) is located in Marshall County in far Western Kentucky and serves a population of approximately 31,000 individuals. The population is 97.74% white with 20.3% of the population being under 18 years and 22.5% over 65. The public health issue faced with the development of this model practice is the real-time equitable collection of data, specifically qualitative data from specific populations. The goals were to gather real-time data from a subpopulation of the community and use this to not only help develop our community health assessment but to hold sustainability so we can measure trends and patterns over time.
To accomplish this, we expanded on the visioning described in the Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships (MAPP) process. The MCHD partnered with the local public school system to engage students in obtaining their vision of a healthy community. The objective was to visit one middle school and collect data from 50 students; however, through partnerships, we completed these visioning sessions in all nine of the public schools in Marshall County and collected data from over 200 students. The students were asked to draw a picture and write a few sentences describing their vision of a perfectly healthy community. We not only exceeded our goal, but we gathered qualitative data from all age ranges from elementary to high school.
Subgroups were chosen at each school. For the two middle schools, The BETA club, the largest independent, non-profit, educational youth organization in America, and The Explore Learning Pathways students were chosen to participate. The Explore program is a specialized learning platform for select students at the middle school. For the elementary schools, participants in Team Ultra (offered to grades 3-5) were chosen. Team Ultra teaches students about physical activity, nutrition, and upstanding character. The students at the high school were part of the Marshall Mission, which works to improve diversity and inclusion within the school and serve as student ambassadors.
The public health impact of this relates to the essential public health service of Assess and Monitor Public Health. By gathering data on what a healthy community means to this subgroup we can better understand the needs and adapt our programs, services, and partnerships.
This took community engagement on the partnership level (with the local public schools), but also with the children from whom the data was gathered. Youth are considered a vulnerable population; however, they have a voice, and it needs to be heard. According to the Mid-America Regional Council (MARC) children are considered medically vulnerable. The UNICEF Convention on the rights of the Child states, Children are not just objects who belong to their parents and for whom decisions are made, or adults in training. Rather, they are human beings and individuals with their own rights”. By using this subgroup in the population, we gathered qualitative data from a group often overlooked. We wanted to take steps such as contacting the schools and carefully choosing subgroups of students to participate in eliminating health inequities and promoting the equitable collection of data. Groups were chosen due to diversity in learning, participation in specific programs, and the diversity of the programs.
The largest milestone was our reach. Our goal was to reach 50 students in the Explore Learning Pathways group; however, we reached 227 total students during the 1st round of this practice in the 2021-2022 school year. We increased those numbers to 314 responses on the 2nd round of visioning sessions in the 2022-2023 school year. The specific factors of this success were not only the partnership with the local public school system but also our partnerships at the MCHD through the health educators of Team Ultra. The health educators were trained on the presentation to students by the Public Health Program Specialist and then gathered the data from that group of students.
Overall, this promotion was a success. Going from a goal of 50 students to over 200. We wanted to make great strides in reducing health inequities in data collection, specifically for the Community Health Assessment. We were not only able to gather visioning data from students but the participation in our community health assessment survey doubled for the under-18 age group from the last survey conducted in 2019.
https://www.marshallcohealthdepartment.com/2020/