Social Belonging Needed in County

This summer, while working on Jefferson County's Community Health Assessment (CHA) and subsequent Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP), two of Keith Hammonds's articles in The Monitor piqued my attention. His comment, "I'd love to see the county Health Department create a "director of community belonging" ("Belonging and civic life in America," June 19), made me stop and think about how we could make that happen. A sense of belonging and connectedness is a protective factor in our health and well-being.

The follow-up article was a conversation with Julia Hotz, author of the new book The Connection Cure: The Prescriptive Power of Movement, Nature, Art, Service, and Belonging (Simon & Schuster), in the July 3, 2024 edition. Keith asked the author to define the difference between physical and social determinants of health. Her answer resonated with me, and I bought the book. Her answer also aligned with the work I had been immersed in with the CHA and CHIP.

Julia is not a medical professional. She is a journalist. Her definition of social determinants of health is relatable and well stated, "To survive, we need basic resources – the things you think about when you hear "environment:" clean air, trees, nutritious food, shelter, and money. To thrive, we need sources of joy, meaning, and relationships in our environments, too: reasons to wake up in the morning, things that make us feel healthy, and connections to what matters to us.

Together, these sources of surviving and thriving are called social determinants of health."

A comment in my last column, "Health is a result of many factors and is more than the absence of illness. It is influenced and inclusive of how we live, work and play as individuals, families and communities," speaks to these social drivers. Most of our health and well-being is socially determined by the connections in our environments.

The American Medical Association attributes 80% of our overall health to our environment, with 20% affected by health care. Socioeconomic factors contribute 40%, health behaviors 30%, and 10% is dependent upon physical environment. "Social determinants of health (SDOH) are the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks." (Healthy People 2030) All these factors shape our daily lives.

During the spring of this year, the CHA team began looking at how we could collect quality primary data for our assessment. This data is gathered from individuals' personal experiences. It is raw, first-hand information, collected through surveys and personal interviews. This data was of great interest to me. I wanted to know what our community members were experiencing and what was important to them regarding their health.

The core advisory group for the project and I spent much time in thoughtful conversation about inviting a team of stakeholders with diversity in age, lived experience, and location throughout the county to the table. These stakeholders would drive decision-making as we progressed in creating a CHIP. Ensuring a variety of resident voices were heard in our survey and interviews, coupled with a diverse stakeholder group, would provide quality primary data to help us identify priorities for improvement. Representing the "surviving" and "thriving" components of SDOH in our primary data was an important consideration in its collection. Our goal was to create physical and social environments that would promote attaining health and well-being for all of Jefferson County residents.

The 2024 CHIP will continue with improvements from the 2020 CHIP, consider impacts from the pandemic, and create new goals for improving our environment. Julia Hotz wisely observes, "When our environments improve, our health does, too."

Engaging in the community through civic participation benefits the community and those who participate. We can contribute to bettering ourselves, our community, and ultimately our health in many ways. I invite you to engage in this improvement process. Each of us can be a resource in improving personal and community well-being as we participate in community activities, vote on issues that impact our health, volunteer our time and resources, and strive to improve social connections in our environments. Here's to thriving!