Local health organizations — including Cody Regional Health, Healthy Park County, Heritage Health Center, Powell Valley Healthcare and Park County Public Health — have come together to complete this year’s Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA).

Every three years for the past six years, multiple CHNA’s have been conducted in Park County by individual health organizations. However, all parties involved in this year’s CHNA agreed it’s been a repetitive and siloed approach.

“We thought it was better to pool resources and work together for a greater impact,” said Bill Crampton, Park County Public Health nurse manager.

The CHNA process provides a way for communities to prioritize their health needs and then to plan and act upon the unmet needs collaboratively over the next three years. All organizations are using numerical factual data, supplemented by a survey given to residents across Park County to collect direct community feedback.

“We all were excited to work together on this because when we pool our resources, it makes this large task much easier to complete, implement and see results,” said Wendy Morris, Healthy Park County Coordinator. “The data collected will be used as a guiding reference to assist our Healthy Park County Coalition efforts in the coming years,”

The plan is to have the 2019-2021 CHNA finalized by December 2019. At that point, it will be made available on each of the organizations’ websites.