Assessment Process Overview

In just three short years, Garrett County has quickly became a national leader in community health planning, assessment, and improvement. As the first major assessment and improvement cycle closes this year, our community agencies and stakeholders are beginning a series of processes to continue our work in making Garrett County, Maryland a healthier place to live, work, and play!

With the addition of mygarrettcounty.com, a living and perpetual community improvement platform, Garrett County is poised to advance public health, improve outcomes, and work together to transcend long-standing issues that impact quality of life.

In this new community health assessment and improvement cycle, the Garrett County Health Department in conjunction with the Garrett County Local Management Board, Garrett County Behavioral Health Authority, Garrett County Government, Mountain Laurel Medical Center, and Garrett Regional Medical Center will be conducting a modular Community Health Assessment (also referred to as a CHA, Community Health Needs Assessment, CHNA, or Community Needs Assessment, CNA).

This assessment will focus on collecting primary data that our community agencies and stakeholders need to inform programming and systems-level changes needed to improve outcomes. While previous assessments have been entirely comprehensive, this assessment focuses intentionally on collecting, aggregating, and illustrating the most important, missing pieces of data: what you, our community, want us to focus on the most. Further, this data will be supplemented by an exhaustive search of secondary datasets that will help to weave the incredible tapestry that is our beautiful, diverse, and caring community.

Each phase of the assessment process will be identified and recorded here, completely transparently, with multiple opportunities to participate in the process, and become an ambassador for your local community.

Planning Is Now Mobilized

Thanks to mygarrettcounty.com, our community now transparently collaborates in mobilized, topic-focused teams called action groups. These 150+ groups highlight the strategies our community is developing across sectors to address the greatest needs in our community, better serve our most vulnerable populations, and streamline processes to improve outcomes by collecting hyper local data and measuring what truly matters.

100+ Public Open Data Resources Are Now Indexed

While previous community health assessments were lengthy, and often duplicated data collection, this new cycle builds on the wealth of information collected in the previous 2016 Garrett County Community Health Assessment, supplemental, specific community assessments, such as the 2019 Garrett County Behavioral Health Authority and 2019 Mountain Laurel Medical Center community needs assessments, and the rapidly growing Garrett County Open Data Warehouse by intentionally focusing on mapping our needs to better understand how different communities within our county, or zip codes in the case of this cycle’s strategy, identify needs, relate to their communities, and utilize public and private health care resources.

These extensive local, state, and national datasets will inform this work, and be incorporated in mapping tools to be designed as a end-product of this assessment cycle. These tools will be designed to intentionally incorporate both traditional public health data and social determinants of health, such as income and jobs, education, housing, etc…, that are now widely accepted to be the upstream causes of persistent poor health outcomes that are difficult to address within the lens of public health alone.

An example of these applications is shown below. Note, this cycle will ideally include respondents outside of Garrett County, who work, play, or utilize services within our region. If a statistically significant sample of these are collected, we will also make this data available in aggregate as an interactive application.

The extended partnerships in this cycle’s endeavor will help our community collect, tabulate, and illustrate a comprehensive picture that will help our local and state agencies and stakeholders better plan and implement initiatives to improve outcomes in a holistic way that leads to long-term improvements in public health.

A Shift Toward Actionable Data Collection

As our local community health assessment and improvement planning processes continue to evolve with an increased focus on collecting the most useful and actionable data, we happily credit the other counties, regions, and cities that have helped shaped our processes:

• Howard County, Maryland Community Health Needs Assessment Model
• Richmond City, Virginia Health District Community Health Assessment Model
• Denver, Colorado Public Health Assessment

Additional Resources

• Survey Sample Size Calculator
• Community Tool Box Best Practices for Community Surveys

The Survey Instrument

The Garrett County Health Department’s Population Health, Innovation, and Informatics Unit champions county-wide assessment, planning, and health improvement. These processes are reviewed at public Health Planning Council meetings held once a month at the Garrett County Health Department with a variety of stakeholders. Their mission: to ensure a high quality, effective, and integrated community care system that is responsive to the needs of residents. For those unable to attend, every stakeholder and member of the public is invited join us digitally for a transparent look at these processes on mygarrettcounty.com.

In addition to the Health Planning Council meetings, local agencies and key stakeholder groups (consisting of staff from the Garrett County Health Department, Garrett County Local Management Board, Garrett County Behavioral Health Authority, Mountain Laurel Medical Center, and Garrett Regional Medical Center) met on March 12, 2019 to review a sample draft of the survey instrument. In order to ensure that our instrument captures the most valuable information and is equitable in design, this process will be extended this cycle to include a one week, anonymous public comment window on the Garrett County Health Department’s website at garretthealth.org from March 20 thru March 27, 2019.

Following this period, the group will meet again to review community feedback and make any revisions to the survey in the interest of furthering health equity practices in Garrett County.

Public Review of the Survey Instrument

We invite members of the public and Garrett County stakeholders to review the Garrett County Community Health Assessment 2019-2021 survey instrument prior to the collection of responses. This serves to ensure equitable practices and gives the community an opportunity to request additional issues/concerns to be addressed in this survey. Please note that we will also conduct focus groups to dive deeper into topics that are identified as priorities in this survey.

All responses are anonymous, and we invite your honest feedback to better inform this process.

2019-2021 Garrett County Community Health Assessment Data Divisions

• 21520 – Accident
• 21522 – Bittinger*
• 21523 – Bloomington*
• 21531 – Friendsville
• 21536 – Grantsville
• 21538 – Kitzmiller
• 21541 – McHenry
• 21550 – Oakland
• 21561 – Swanton

*Survey sample was not large enough to be statistically significant for the marked areas. All other areas were statistically significant at the 95% CI/10% MoE level.

Focusing On What Matters Most

While a major component of this community health assessment and improvement cycle is to collect baseline data on many topics that we currently do not have data for at this time, we acknowledge the significant discoveries that were derived from the focus groups in the previous, 2016 Garrett County Community Health Assessment. These conversations and trends within multiple groups of diverse stakeholders from around our county’s wide geographic area were vital to uncovering underlying themes within the previous cycle.

This year, the Garrett County Health Department will lead several additional focus groups around the county to supplement the additional data that is collected from the survey instrument.

2019 Garrett County Focus Groups:

• July 18, 2019 – 21550 – Oakland – Heidi’s Cafe – 3:30pm
• July 19, 2019 – 21561 – Swanton – Swanton Community Center – 11am
• July 22, 2019 – 21550 – Oakland – Oakland Ruth Enlow Library – 6pm
• July 23, 2019 – 21531 – Friendsville – Jubilee Diner – 7:30pm
• July 25, 2019 – 21520 – Accident – Lavender Farm – 10:30am
• July 26, 2019 – 21536 – Grantsville – Penn Alps – 11am
• August 1, 2019 – 21541 – McHenry – Greene Turtle – 7pm
• August 2, 2019 – 21538 – Kitzmiller – Coal Bucket Cafe – 11:00am
• August 3, 2019 – 21550 – Oakland – Cornish Cafe – 4pm