Health survey begins

Lorain County Health Partners want residents’ views of health in the community

Some Lorain County residents will begin receiving surveys in the mail this week from the Lorain County Health Partners.

A news release from Lorain County Public Health, said the 2,400 surveys will be mailed to residents older than the age of 19 who were randomly picked to give Health Partners a view of health in the community as part of the triennial Community Health assessment. Lorain County Health Partners include: Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services Board of Lorain County, Cleveland Clinic Avon Hospital, Lorain County Board of Mental Health, Lorain County Health & Dentistry, Lorain County Public Health, Lorain County Metro Parks, Mercy Health and University Hospitals Elyria Medical Center.

Lorain County Health Commissioner Dave Covell said the assessment is required by law and will be used to form a health improvement plan.

“They do a full survey and find out things like how active are people, do they have a doctor, a variety of health related questions,” Covell said. “We’ll gather all that data and then we’ll also compare that with hospital data to rates of

infant mortality and rates of cardiovascular health and those kinds of things.”

Once all the data is collected, Covell said, it will be analyzed to determine the community’s health needs.

During that process, the Lorain County Health Partners will hold public meetings to discuss the best ways to attack the issues of most concern.

“As you can imagine, the opioid epidemic is one that usually pops up and some other pieces like that,” Covell said. “At that point, we’ll set a three-year plan for us and the hospitals to really work together to try and do some prevention in the community.”

Catherine Woskobnick, vice president of mission at Mercy Health Lorain, said one of the issues that popped up in the 2015 assessment was a need for women older than the age of 50 to get mammograms.

“We, right now, are focusing on mammograms over the next three years to see how we can increase the women that are in the southern portion of Lorain County have a better focus on getting their mammograms done,” Woskobnick said. “Because we don’t want them to have a greater propensity toward breast cancer.”

Another part of the plan built on the 2015 data is that community members felt there weren’t enough ways to get help from behavioral health clinicians, Woskobnick said.

“What we did at Mercy Health, is we went ahead, and in our primary care offices, we have hired three women that are clinical psychologists,” she said. “Since we have integrated clinical psychologists into our practices, we have had a 195 percent increase in appointments. It’s been amazing.”

Jim Ziemnik, director of the Lorain County Metro Parks, said his organization intends to use the information gained from the survey to see how people use the county’s parks to stay healthy.

“Our level of interest is in people’s perception of the parks in a community health kind of way,” Ziemnik said. “The research keeps coming forward that there’s an amazing value to walking through a green space instead of a highly urban area.”

Covell said there are five main categories the partners are working on based on the 2015 results: improve access to care; healthy weight and obesity issues; tobacco; infant mortality; and mental health and drug addiction services.

One of the areas that

has shown success so far has been infant mortality, he said.

“Since we started this five years ago, from the results of the 2012 survey, we’ve actually done quite a bit of work and our infant mortality rate has plummeted,” Covell said. “We have one of the better ones in the state now as we were struggling for a little bit.”

Partners will release a report from this year’s survey in spring 2019 and will be compared to data from the 2015 survey to determine how public health issues have changed in the intervening years.

Covell emphasized the need for those who receive a survey to fill it out and return it to Lorain County Public Health.

The surveys protect the identity of those who fill it out.

“If they got selected, we’d love to have them participate,” Covell said.

“Since we started this five years ago, from the results of the 2012 survey, we’ve actually done quite a bit of work and our infant mortality rate has plummeted.”

— Lorain County Health Commissioner Dave Covell