Grand Forks – In Grand Forks and Polk counties, mental health, substance use, and transportation are among the top ongoing concerns of community members, according to a new study.
Posted in Grand Forks.
The assessment, announced last week by Masters of Public Health Programs at Grand Forks Public Health, Altru, and UND, is the latest in a series of community health assessments that have been conducted every three years since 2013. , UND’s MPH program, and Grand Forks Public Health, and informs Altru and Grand Forks Public Health of public health priorities and action plans.
Mental health, substance use and transportation are public health concerns also identified by the 2019 CHA, while other key concerns identified in this year’s assessment include access to healthcare, access to, insurance coverage.
The planning, data collection, and data analysis portions of the assessment are completed by UND graduate students in the school’s MPH program.
MPH Assistant Director Ashley Bayne said:
Sarah Larson, an MPH student who specializes in Indigenous Health, says that conducting research is not only professionally beneficial, but also provides opportunities for collaboration to get to know the community and improve community health in Grand Forks. He said it also helped him understand what it was like.
“Having these very important personalities come together and do all the work to promote and serve the public is a great opportunity to see what partnerships look like at the public level.” she said.
The assessment consists of three components: secondary data from national, state and local sources, community surveys containing approximately 400 responses, and focus group discussions with community leaders and special groups. Special collective focus groups included New Americans, LGBT people, Indigenous peoples, and adults with disabilities.
Secondary data include information on demographics, risk factors and health outcomes and are collected by other agencies to provide an overview of community health, whereas surveys and group discussions conducted by UND are It’s more community specific.
Across all components, Bayne said the data tells the same story within the community.
“We can use focus groups to reveal more community research and secondary data, so the themes all line up nicely,” says Bayne.
In 2019, the Grand Forks Community Advisory Board identified substance use, mental health, obesity, transportation, medical and housing costs as the top six health priorities over the next three years. While no official priorities for the next three years have yet been selected, Grand Forks Public Health Director Debbie Swanson said access to mental health and behavioral health services will carry over, based on data from this year’s survey. He said it is likely.
Between 2019 and 2022, both Grand Forks and Polk counties improved their population to mental health provider ratios, but both counties increased the average number of days of mental health illness reported in a 30-day period. did. Grand Forks County mental health provider ratio improved from 350:1 in 2019 to 280:1, while days with mental health illness increased from 3.1 in 2019 to 3.5 in 2022. Did. Polk County has improved the population to mental health provider ratio. From 490:1 to 390:1, the number of days with mental health illness increased from 3.1 to 4.1 from 2019 to 2022.
Additionally, in community surveys, about 30% of respondents said they had poor access to mental health services in their communities. Lack of mental health services and providers was cited as a barrier to health care and a concern that respondents face regularly.
“These issues seem to be of greater concern in the community, both in terms of access to services and overall mental health,” Swanson said.
Concerns about substance use in the community are also consistent from the 2019 assessment, Swanson said.
The similarities in results from year to year speak more to how prevalent problems such as mental health and drug use are in communities than the success of continued work to address these issues.
“The fact that they continue to work and remain a pressing issue further underscores the need to prioritize these types of issues,” Larson said. I’m not saying that, it’s just that it’s so complex that it needs to be viewed through different lenses and that it needs to be prioritized on an ongoing basis.”
This year’s CHA also highlighted new concerns of community members. One was how the lack of cultural inclusion and culturally appropriate care could be a barrier for some of the larger Grand Forks community.
“We had a really good discussion about how all service providers and health care providers in the community could better serve the residents of the Grand Forks area,” said Swanson. “While this is a new debate, it is certainly an old theme in terms of access to care.”
After the 2019 assessment, in early 2020, Altru and Grand Forks Public Health will develop a community health improvement plan and implementation strategy that describes how identified community health priorities will be addressed. Did. However, Swanson said his COVID-19 pandemic, which began in March 2020, has impacted both parties’ ability to implement those plans.
“All the entities involved in our assessment and planning work were so deeply involved in the pandemic response that we really don’t have a way to monitor progress very effectively and see how we are doing. was,” she said.
Some data on COVID-19 are included in this study, including vaccination and infection rates in Polk and Grand Forks counties, but the long-term effects of the pandemic on community health are not yet known. .
“I think there are some preliminary effects that are clearly visible, but I think there are long-term effects that we won’t see for quite some time,” Bain said.
Despite COVID-19 being a significant public health event since the 2019 survey, Larson said COVID-19 was rarely heard as a primary health concern in focus group interviews. said.
“It was more peripheral,” she said. “There may have been a time or two when someone said that COVID worsened their mental health and substance use, but that’s a personal opinion and we really can’t draw a definitive conclusion.”
Near the end of the year, Swanson said, the Community Advisory Board will formally establish community health priorities for the next three years and issue a full report. brings the group together to develop an action plan for how to address these priorities.
