By law, Madisonhealth is required to do a community needs health assessment. To do this, and to remain as unbiased as possible, they hired an outside organization called On the Ground to gather information for this assessment. The assessment will be used by Madisonhealth to determine the needs of the communities it serves and help bridge those gaps. The general area is Jefferson, Fremont and Madison County.
I assisted on the ground with the survey portion of this assessment. This included reviewing the survey questions before they were published for use, translation of the survey, promotional flyer, and fact sheet to Spanish, as well as stakeholder and community engagement.
For those who are interested in seeing (and possibly taking) the survey for a deeper understanding of the questions asked, the QR code for it is below. This should be valid through July 2024:
Although I did not create the questions, I did have a brief opportunity to review and go over them with On the Ground and discuss there relevance. The objective of the review was to make sure questions asked would remain unbiased, give us proper demographic information, and inform us of the needed care of the communities.
The survey was broken down into four sections; demographics, access to healthcare services, mental/behavioral health needs and resources and two open ended questions where a person could write out their thoughts on additional healthcare related needs.
On the Ground would like to reach out to as many people as possible. The more data to work with, the better. One very specific thing I suggested, then did, was translating the survey, flyer and fact sheet to Spanish. I am fortunate enough to be able to speak and write in Spanish, and after discussing it with a few local leaders, I learned there is a substantial Spanish speaking population within the communities Madisonhealth serves and went to work on the translation. The Spanish survey, although complete, has not yet been rolled out, but should be ready by the end of June 2024 and throughout July 2024.
For those interested, here is what the digital copy of the flyer and fact sheet translated into Spanish looks like:
Pushing the survey out has become an interesting challenge. I have met with several city councils as well as other local businesses and clinics within the three counties to promote the survey. Nobody knows the community better than the people who live and serve in those communities. By reaching out to these community leaders and businesses, the hope is they can broaden the reach of the survey to the members of the communities in which they serve.
The original end date of the survey was going to be at the end of June 2024. It has been extended to run into July 2024 as there are events taking place which could help us (myself and On the Ground) reach people who may have been more difficult to reach out to now. At the conclusion of the survey, we will examine the data and report back to Madisonhealth.