Carter County Community Health Needs Assessments

A Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) is a government-mandated survey that counties perform to determine the health of their residents and a plan of attack to improve that health. In these assessments, surveyors will see how community members are doing health-wise. Additionally, the assessment will determine discouraging factors in the community that prevent members from being healthy, and if there are factors that can be improved upon. In 2015, a Mountain States Health Alliance (MSHA) facility, Sycamore Shoals Hospital (SSH), conducted this community health needs assessment. Carter County, Tennessee was the area that was surveyed by this particular hospital. The CHNA assessment team described this area as the South East Market region

To begin with, the Carter County Community Health Needs Assessment analyzed multiple health factors and identified core measures based on state and county data. The following core measures are separated by the following categories: behaviors, community and environment, policy, clinical care, and outcomes. The behaviors category identified modifiable, high-risk behaviors that can lead to poor health outcomes. Smoking, binge drinking, drug deaths, obesity, physical inactivity, and high school graduation rates are the modifiable health outcomes that were focused on. The community and environment category looked at the violent crime, occupational fatalities, childhood poverty, and infectious disease rates. Policy observations focused on lack of health insurance, public health funding, and immunization rates for children and adolescents. Rates of low birth weights, amount of primary care physicians, dentists, and preventable hospitalizations were attributed to the clinical care category. The final category of outcomes referred to the prevalence of diabetes, poor mental health days, poor physical health days, disparity in health status, infant mortality rates, cardiovascular deaths, cancer deaths, and premature (before 75 years of age) deaths. These core measures gave a very basic overview of community health that allows for a person to understand the general health of the population. However, the environmental core measure does not account for pollution, amount of green spaces, housing, nor access to basic needs like groceries for the community. Furthermore, income is addressed in the supplemental measures, but the environmental situation is indicative of the health of the community and can influence it greatly, so these factors should have been considered to be part of the core measures