Williamson health and wellness center

The Williamson Health and Wellness Center, positioned in West Virginia, evolved a Community-Driven Health Equity Action Plan to release a collaborative, network-pushed-making plans method to foster shared management and growth buy-in from network representatives, companions, and stakeholders to lessen fitness inequities of their network.

Vision and Goals Excerpt

As the Appalachians appear toward the future, many groups display a willingness to evolve to alternate in choice of locating answers. A bendy mindset and developing consideration withinside the notion that our dreams may be attained will mark a cultural shift, one which occurs predominantly thru our interactions as we paint together, deliberately making the time to navigate tough hurdles. By know-how, rural groups, and striving to make upgrades, our efforts over the following ten years will bring about progressed bodily environments with more possibilities and a reachable assist for all.

The Healthy withinside the Hills Network (Network), hooked up in 2012, is a crew of cross-region companions in southern West Virginia and jap Kentucky who’ve evolved a shared imaginative and prescient for enhancing rural fitness that can be replicable in rural regions throughout the US and abroad.

This plan becomes evolved as Network companions started to impeach the way to construct a lifestyle of fitness and address network wishes together.

The Network identified that leveraging sources from the nation and country-wide companions and throughout county traces in Mingo County, West Virginia, and Pike County, Kentucky ought to cause innovative answers in constructing a lifestyle of fitness.

The plan will offer the Network a framework to make systemic upgrades to cope with underlying troubles that create fitness disparities. Network dreams fall inside 4 cognizance regions: 1) an engaged rural community, 2) data-pushed decisions, 3) sturdy communications, and 4) sustained development.

The Network acknowledges that constructing a lifestyle of fitness is an energetic and iterative method and that via way of means of honing the abilities of task companions thru education and energetic participation in network projects, the effects can be long-lasting.

Goals include:

1. Engaged Community Network: Ensure infrastructure and sources are to be had to grow network participation in making plans.
2. Data-Driven Decisions: Utilize equipment to become aware of fitness and fairness limitations to tell network decision-making.
3. Strong Communications: Engage stakeholders and citizens to make fitness fairness a shared value.
4. Sustained Improvement: Build capability of the Network and network thru making plans, assessments, and a dedication to development.

Community Context Excerpt

Poverty, unemployment, and a loss of academic fulfillment affect a network`s get admission to care and cap the potential to interaction in wholesome behaviors. Without a community of assistance, households battle to thrive, and employers are hesitant to release or extend agencies withinside the area. The Network exists to fill that hole via way of means of addressing the social determinants of fitness that citizens face.

Currently, greater than 29% of Mingo County citizens stay in families with earnings beneath the Federal Poverty Level.

Race disparities are obvious withinside the county; an expected 40% of Caucasian kids stay in poverty as compared to 72% of African American kids. Roughly 13% (1,409 of 10,910) of all county families haven’t any motor vehicles, primarily based totally on estimates from the brand new 5-yr American Community Survey. More than 10,000 humans in Mingo County (42.4% of the populace) get hold of SNAP advantages and 60.07% of public college students are eligible for free/decreased free lunch. There are 4,559 humans, 25.63% of the overall county populace elderly 25 and older, without an excessive college diploma. Just over 1,000 younger humans, a while 16-19, aren’t presently enrolled in college and aren’t employed.

Williamson Health and Wellness Center is a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) based in 2011 to serve a place recognized to be one of the unhealthiest Takedietplan and maximum distressed groups in West Virginia. It serves as an anchor organization for the Network, offering economic and human capital to assist the area`s network fitness development journey.

The Network ambitions to cope with the social determinants of fitness and fitness fairness limitations to make sure the converting nearby financial system affects the network at large.