Mental health care tops issues at Community Health Needs Assessment meeting

Mental health care, including diagnostic, treatment and after care, was the runaway issue that needs to be addressed for those who attended Tuesday’s Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) town hall meeting. The issue received 40 votes, 14 more than the next highest rated issue, substance abuse, from the more than 70 community and county members at the meeting at Newton DMACC.

“This is your town hall,” facilitator Vince Vandehaar said. “We want to hear everyone’s opinions.”

Hosted by MercyOne Newton Medical Center and the Jasper County Health Department, the town hall meeting is a part of the process to update the 2016 CHNA, a systematic collection, assembly, analysis and dissemination of information about the health of the community. A CHNA’s role is to identify factors that affect the health of a population and determine the availability of resources to adequately address those factors.

“Our three top needs last time (the CHNA was completed) were mental health, child abuse prevention and fall prevention,” JCHD Administrator Becky Pryor said.

Those in attendance answered two main questions — Are there health care services in your community neighborhood that you feel need to be improved and/or changed and what are the strengths of our community that contribute to health?

Beyond mental health care and substance abuse, the group named transportation to healthcare, lack of childcare, homelessness, domestic violence, lack of specialty doctors and obesity as the top issues in the county.

On the positive side, areas including emergency services, youth programming, availability of resources, the school system and the amount of providers in the county were strengths listed. The substance abuse coalition, mobile crisis response team and appearance of strong community interest also were rated high for the area.

The answers provided by those at the town hall corresponded with data already collected by an online survey for CHNA. Mental health was once again a top concern rating red, or negative, for the county by the survey takers, along with the emergency room, family planning services, inpatient services and nursing homes. Rated green, or positive, are the county’s ambulance services, school nurses, public health, pharmacy, outpatient services, eye doctors and chiropractors.

A comment from one survey taker said, “I believe we need more hours for specialty clinic, some doctors only come once a month.” Another commented that a “detox unit is desperately needed” and another simply put “homeless population.”

The survey also showed 83 percent go outside of Jasper County for care and while 46 percent believe officials are actively working together to address community health, 13 percent said no and 40 percent said they didn’t know.

Of those surveyed, 60 percent rated the overall quality of healthcare delivery as good or very good. Thirty-two percent rated it as average, 8 percent as poor and no one gave a very poor rating. As for what is causing poor health in the area, limited access to mental health ranked highest at 25 percent with poverty second at 22 percent and lack of awareness of existing local programs or providers at 17 percent.

The county received high rankings in opportunity to exercise at 81 percent and a low uninsured rate. Adult obesity has seen a 12 percent increase from 20 years ago along with a higher than average opioid prescription rate.

Contact Jamee A. Pierson at 641-792-3121 ext. 6534 or jpierson@newtondailynews.com