The Summit County Health Department has a new guiding document intended to steer the next five years of education and programming, with a particular focus on community partnerships, nutrition and increasing immunization rates.
Officials began to collect data on local health trends in 2024 as part of their comprehensive community health assessment. The assessment included focus groups and a countywide survey to obtain information on residents’ health concerns, which were compiled and later integrated into the five-year community health improvement plan, as recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We wanted to make sure that we were reaching people across different backgrounds, locations and experiences, and this work really represents input from the entire county,” said epidemiologist Nancy Porter. “It gives us a big picture of what’s going on and helps us to identify what’s going well and where the gaps are.”
Porter told the Summit County Council on Wednesday that the Health Department received more than 1,700 responses to its survey, a fair sample of county residents.
“As a health department, it’s our responsibility to understand the needs of the people that we serve, and the (community health assessment) gives us a great foundation with real evidence and not guesswork,” Porter said. “Every zip code is represented in this data set, and it was one of the first times we were able to get an LGBTQ estimate for the county, which is an important step to help us understand our community more fully.”
The People’s Health Clinic, a nonprofit that provides healthcare for uninsured patients, partnered with the Health Department to administer surveys to Hispanic residents in both English and Spanish, too. Approximately 12% of respondents identified as Hispanic, which closely mirrors demographic percentages at the county level.
As part of the survey, residents were asked to describe aspects of life in Summit County beneficial to their health. Unsurprisingly, the top answer was convenient access to outdoor recreation areas, followed by safe neighborhoods, clean environments, healthcare and places to raise children.
“What really stands out here is that these aren’t clinical factors,” Porter said. “People aren’t defining health by doctors or hospitals. They’re defining it by the conditions of the community that they live in.”
The survey also asked about residents’ health concerns, and Porter said those responses included affordable housing, affordable food, elder care, childcare and transportation options.
Approximately 40% of respondents said they were also worried about immunization rates, with many residents expressing anxieties about the vaccination status of others and the spread of preventable diseases.
“We’re seeing a decline in childhood vaccination rates,” Porter said. “School exemptions have been increasing for at least the past five years, and we’re seeing the impact of that now with the current measles outbreak. … People also said safety was a concern of theirs, and that aligns with what we’re seeing nationally and highlights the continued need for clear, trusted communication around this.”
Around 92% of students in Summit County are vaccinated, which is the easiest method of estimating vaccination rates in the community. However, herd immunity for measles requires a vaccination rate of 95%.
The community health improvement plan, which was created by a group of more than 40 stakeholders in addition to the Health Department, outlined three priorities for the next five years in Summit County: strengthening partnerships, improving food and nutrition access and increasing immunization coverage.
Deputy County Health Director Kendra Babitz said strengthening partnerships with community organizations is intentionally a broad goal to allow the Health Department to support a wide variety of groups.
Porter similarly said the community health improvement plan originated with the Health Department, but its five-year outlook is to help guide decisions and programming across the county, including nonprofit partners that may specialize in assisting specific populations or offer different services. The data collected through the community health assessment could also help community organizations obtain more funding through grant applications, she added.
Those partnerships will likely be key in combating food insecurity and providing resources for Summit County families as part of the five-year plan’s second objective.
“We have a lot of discrepancy between the East Side and the West Side in terms of accessing healthy food and affordable food,” Babitz said. “This is something we want to help by taking some of the efforts that are already happening in the community and strengthening and improving those efforts to help people who would like to have fresh produce.”
Porter said increasing immunization rates will rely on education, but she said her vision is to engage with the community to address their specific fears rather than assume the Health Department knows why families aren’t vaccinating their children.
“We are really excited that, for the first time, we feel like … we can make coordinated, long-term, sustainable impacts on some of these health factors and outcomes we care about in the community,” Babitz said.
Information on the community health improvement plan, including the Health Department’s progress, is available online at summitcountyhealth.org/chip. Babitz and Porter said they would also appear before the County Council intermittently to provide updates on the plan’s implementation.