Mental health a priority concern for counties

5-year improvement planning process underway to address public health issues
By: 
Tim Ryan
Reporter

SHAWANO — Addressing mental health issues will be the top concern of public health officials in Shawano and Menominee counties over the next five years, based on a community health assessment drafted by the local public health department.

Alcohol and drug abuse placed second on the list of priorities, followed by chronic disease.

Those priorities were identified partly by examining regional data from hospital records that included disease conditions and hospitalization rates compiled by the state Department of Health Services, along with demographic information collected through census data.

A community health survey was also conducted over the summer of last year to solicit feedback from Shawano and Menominee county residents on what they believed were the top health concerns in their communities.

The survey had 471 responses.

The collected data and survey results were then presented at a community meeting last month where the 65 community members who attended voted on the top three priorities that should be the focus of a community health improvement plan.

All local health departments in the state are required to go through a health improvement planning process every five years.

The process is guided by a steering committee that was put in place of May of last year.

“We have a wide reach with this steering committee and it’s a pretty diverse group,” said Nicholas Mau, community health educator with the Shawano-Menominee Counties Health Department. “It represents the tribes, county services and some local non-profits.”

Each of the priorities identified in thew community health assessment will have its own task team made up of community members and professionals related to those topic areas, according to Mau.

“They will select goals and objectives and strategies to address those issues,” he said.

The last community health assessment conducted for Shawano and Menominee counties in 2014 identified alcohol and drug abuse as the top health concern.

The local drug court and expansion of the drug take-back program were two of the initiatives that came out of the task team meetings focused on addressing that issue, Mau said.

Early childhood development and physical activity and nutrition rounded out the top three priorities in 2014.

Mau said he wasn’t surprised to see mental health at the top of the priority list this time around.

He said mental health is connected to many other health-related issues.

“You could almost say mental health is the root cause of some of these other problems,” he said. “I believe it’s important we address mental health as its own issue because when we improve mental health and people’s ability to cope with mental health issues, this would feed into improvement of chronic disease and how people approach preventative health or how they address substance abuse.”

The task teams assigned to each of the health assessment priorities will hold about four meetings between March and June, Mau said.

“During that time, they’ll develop strategies and create a plan,” he said.

The next phase will be implementing those goals and objectives over the course of the next five years through partnerships with other entities and agencies in the community.

“This whole process should be community-driven,” Mau said. “If you don’t have that community buy-in, the work isn’t as effective and it isn’t as far-reaching.”

The task teams will decide how often they want to meet over the next five years to monitor and report on progress.

“We are hopefully empowering the community and mobilizing partners that are already doing some of this work to achieve some reportable outcomes for the next five years,” Mau said.

Anyone interested in joining a task team or being otherwise involved in the process can contact the health department at 715-526-4808.