Celebrate Community Health Improvement Efforts at Fort HealthCare

The week of June 10-14, 2024, is National Community Health Improvement week.  Community health improvement is a guiding star for Fort HealthCare (FHC).  In fact, this language plays prominently in our mission and vision statements:

FHC Mission: Improve the health and well-being of the community.

FHC Vision: Be the healthiest community in Wisconsin.

Improving the health of a community and then keeping a community healthy is challenging and inspiring work.  FHC strongly believes that achieving good health is a factor of both excellent medical care and satisfying important social determinants of health. These social determinants of health can include transportation, food security, housing and more. Fort HealthCare has experts not only in diagnosing, educating, and treating health issues but in helping to identify and solve community issues that have a large impact on one’s health.

Community health improvement work is not completed in a vacuum but stretches to involve the input of many community organizations and individuals.  By partnering with a larger, representative sample in the community, FHC has been able to develop a shared plan and pool resources to accomplish this important work.

In 2022, a comprehensive Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) was developed by the Dodge Jefferson Healthier Community Partnership (DJHCP) of which FHC is a leading member.  In addition, to this shared plan, Fort HealthCare collected and monitored multiple sources of internal data to determine what the community saw as the greatest health needs.

Informed with the results from these assessments, Fort HealthCare has developed health priorities for 2023-25 in concert with the DJHCP plan which include:

• Access to affordable quality mental healthcare
• Obesity (prevention, nutrition, physical activity)
• Chronic Disease (cancer hypertension, diabetes)

Throughout the Fort HealthCare organization, these 3 priorities help to direct decisions and patients receive needed education on these topics when problems are identified.  Externally, FHC attends many community events, participates in and leads multiple community coalitions (i.e., Suicide Prevention Coalition, Boys and Girls Club, Fort Atkinson Chamber of Commerce, Parish Nursing Program) and partners with trusted institutions (schools, senior centers, libraries, etc.) to address the short-term and long-term community needs.  It is FHC’s belief that we will be closer to attaining our mission and vision through this outreach and we invite you to join us in recognizing and celebrating these community improvement efforts!

To read more about Fort HealthCare’s community health improvement efforts, please click here.