Take action to address community health challenges through a collaborative, coordinated, and continuous process involving community partners.
Addressing community health priorities and making community health improvements can benefit from a well-coordinated, inclusive, and focused Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP) and implementation strategy. Attaining and sustaining voluntary public health accreditation requires a strong and succesfully implemented CHIP. While hospitals, health departments, and other organizations have had success in developing well-coordinated Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNAs or CHAs), moving from that assessment to the creation and implementation of a CHIP has been far more challenging. Once the CHIP is developed, additional effort is needed to ensure effective selection of strategies and improvement interventions, coordination of efforts across community organizations, and development of objectives, targets, and measures. It also is essential to have in place a process for improvement, so that strategies and interventions can be adjusted along the way to ensure that progress is indeed made towards achieving objectives and reaching targets. PHF can help organizations and communities develop, implement, and continuously improve CHIPs that are focused on making measurable improvements to the health of the community.
Includes a combination of the following activities:
- Constitute a team of representatives from local organizations to create and implement a CHIP
- Prioritize areas for short- and long-term community health improvement based on a CHA/CHNA
- Develop baseline measures and achievement targets (e.g., fiscal, capacity, programmatic, process, output, outcome) and timelines for high-priority areas
- Develop an implementation strategy and tracking/monitoring system to ensure achievement of improvement targets
- Develop a communication and performance management reporting system to keep all community partners informed of progress, completed and outstanding assignments, meetings, and due dates
- Implement quality improvement processes so that strategies and interventions are adjusted as necessary to better assure success
Duration varies. Consultation includes both on-site and remote guidance and facilitation.