Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships of the Southern Kenai Peninsula, or MAPP, held a community meeting at Kenai Peninsula College’s Kachemak Bay Campus last Friday to discuss the findings of its latest community health needs assessment.
Roughly every three years since 2009, MAPP conducts the assessment following a model with the same name. The health coalition is funded by South Peninsula Hospital and serves more than 15,000 people in 13 communities around the southern Kenai peninsula.
MAPP coordinator Hannah Gustafson said previous assessments have led to changes within the community. The 2016 assessment opened a conversation around substance misuse in the area. As a result, MAPP established an opioid task force and worked to expand services across the board, from a residential treatment center and behavioral health providers specializing in the area to a cinema series aiming to destigmatize addiction and recovery.
“We have really kind of looked at it from all different angles and had a lot of new programs, organizations and collaborations come out of that,” Gustafson said.
On Friday, interested community members met in person and on Zoom with the coalition to review the data, which is spread across four different assessments, which are community health status, forces of change, local public health systems, and community themes and strengths assessments.
In the health status assessment, MAPP’s steering committee identified and scored 28 different health related needs and issues across five different criteria. This system measured the magnitude of the problem, impact on other health outcomes and disparities in access, as well as opportunities for community collaboration and the ability to implement evidence based solutions. The higher the score, the greater the issue’s priority became.
From this MAPP focused on the six highest scoring issues: mental health, housing, substance misuse, childcare, physical health and food insecurity. Although youth mental health was a separate issue that scored higher than physical health and food insecurity, MAPP grouped it with the general mental health need.
After getting the results of the assessment, attendees broke out into groups to discuss current assets, barriers and potential strategies in relation to every issue.
Some overarching barriers identified in all areas included a lack of physical spaces for services, as well as challenges in communicating already existing resources to the community.
At the end of the meeting, people voted to narrow down the issues to one or two to focus on creating an action plan around.
If the group decides to focus on housing, Gustafson said it will take more than a single entity to address the issue.
“The beauty of coalition work and working collaboratively within the community is that everyone has a role to play with something as complex as housing,” she said, “no one individual or one agency is going to solve the housing issues that we're facing as a community, but if we are all connected, and communicating and working towards a common vision, everyone can be a part of the solution.”
The meeting also opened up in the evening for people who could not attend the morning meeting.
Gustafson said it was important to make the meeting as accessible as possible to get more community input.
“We had a hybrid meeting, and we offered childcare, and I'm here this evening from five to seven pm for people that couldn't come during the day because they were working,” she said, “so [MAPP’s] really being aware of the barriers that may exist for community members to participate and proactively trying to address them, so that it doesn't prevent folks from being involved that are interested.”
She also said the coalition’s work is especially relevant for residents as the population on the southern peninsula continues to grow. MAPP’s health status assessment shows that the region’s projected population growth rate for the next five years is more than four times that of the state and double the national rate.
MAPP will hold another community meeting on October 27 to present the results from Friday and decide on priority issues within the area chosen.
