Vila Health: Planning for Change

Vila Health: Planning for Change
• Credits


Intro
To improve health care outcomes within a community, you need to provide persuasive evidence to decision makers in order to demonstrate your project as a priority for budget and resource planning. One important step to gathering such evidence comes from talking to stakeholders in the community. What are the problems people are facing and how will your project provide a solution to those problems?
Select each location to familiarize yourself with the needs and issues being faced by each community. Jordan is a small town in the Minnesota countryside. Armatage is a neighborhood on the south side of Minneapolis.


Jordan
Jordan City Council/History Center
City Council Member:
We’re seeing more poverty in Jordan and need to address that. I think as a community, we sometimes live in the past and for good reasons. Traditionally, we’ve been kind of a “Lake Wobegon” kind of place – everything and everyone was above average. When I first was elected to the city council, the population here was 94% white. Our last census put that at 89%. Now, don’t misunderstand me – I think diversity is good for this community. All I’m saying is that we need to be aware of the ways this community is changing and make sure we support the growth and change.


Jordan Middle School
Middle School Teacher:
I worry about a lot of these kids. There’s a serious drive to get more mental health education and awareness into the schools, but it isn’t happening very quickly here. We’ve looked at ways we can bridge the gaps, but I don’t see much more than figurative band-aids. We had a situation in the high-school last year with a very popular student who committed suicide just before his graduation. Because this is a small community, a lot of the middle school kids knew him, so we brought in grief counsellors. I just think kids need to have a place where mental health issues are discussed. They think they’re the only one in the world struggling with certain issues, and it would help to know that’s not true. There’s also so much attention to bullying, but are we doing enough?


Residential Area
Jordan Parent:
There aren’t words strong enough to express how frightened I am about this whole opioid thing. My kids are still young – 11 and 9 – but when do you start to worry? My sister-in-law has been put through the wringer dealing with her oldest. Rehab – court – jail. The kid’s only 25 and he’s got a record a mile long. He was a nice kid, too. That’s the thing. So, how do we keep our kids safe from this poison?


Food Shelf
Food Shelf Manager:
The need for our services has been growing steadily ever since we moved into our current space. When we moved in here, we were serving less than 100 families a month. That was three years ago. Now, we’re seeing almost 200 families a month. Donations help, but we have a limited budget and we have to do our best to make sure our shelves stay stocked. So, yes. There is an over emphasis on carbs and processed foods. I wish there was a way to offer better quality protein and fresh fruits and vegetables. We got a donation of apples in one time from one of the orchards – they were seconds that didn’t look so nice, but were still good. You’d have thought they were gold. It broke my heart to see how excited people were over reject apples, but I figure there were a bunch of pies being baked that week.


Jordan Community Education and Recreation Center
Recreation Center Manager:
I’ll be honest – the kids I am seeing are out of shape and often not well prepared for school. I don’t like to sound like an old fogey, but they spend so much time on their phones and other electronics. They aren’t riding their bikes, they aren’t playing baseball, they aren’t reading… It’s all Mariobox and Fortcrafter and it’s taking a toll on the overall health of these kids.


Shopping Plaza
Property Manager:
We have a lot of vacant retail and commercial property in this town. It’s a shame, because I think there’s a lot of potential for many of these sites, but it’s hard for small business owners. You used to see, like a women’s clothing store or a little coffee shop, but those businesses have a hard time competing against the bigger chains. So, they go under and there’s a vacant property on either side of one that’s still hanging in there. That hurts the one’s that are still there. It would be great to get something into these properties, even if it isn’t necessarily a store or a restaurant.


Veteran's Park
Parks Department Representative:
Funding cuts have taken a toll on a lot of our after-school programs. That’s bad enough, but because there aren’t organized events, the parks are turning into the place where kids hang out after dark. Most mornings, particularly after a weekend, the parks are littered with beer cans and worse. We’ve gotten complaints from parents of young children that they go to the playground and there’s beer cans and booze bottles everywhere.


Jordan City Sign
Bike Club President:
We have a very active membership, but recruitment has been difficult. The problem is that the bike trails we do have aren’t very long and they don’t connect to anything. A lot of our members who are avid bikers will use the roads to get places, but novice bikers want trails and ours are pretty random and short.


Senior Living Center
Jordan Family Member of Senior Center Client:
I work at a restaurant and really depend on the adult day care here. The trouble is that Mom isn’t always in the frame of mind where she can do the adult day care. Right now, I can get my brother’s wife, Tessa, to stay with her when she’s having a bad day, but Tessa’s pregnant and won’t be able to do that once the baby comes. I don’t want to put Mom in a nursing home, but she can’t be alone, she can’t always come here, and the cost of a home health aide is more than I make some days.


St. Francis Health Services
Urgent Care Nurse:
This isn’t political, but the situation with health insurance is getting worse, not better. I see so many people in the Urgent Care clinic with complaints that should have been addressed by a primary care giver – but the person doesn’t have a primary care giver. We’re seeing complications from undiagnosed or untreated diabetes. Hypertension. I’ve had two people in the last year who came in for general aches and pains and were in stage IV cancer. There’s no need for a lot of these problems to get so bad, but people can’t afford insurance and so they don’t see a doctor unless they’re sick.


Jordan City Hall
County Social Worker:
Something people don’t really ever address is how to deal with the day to day costs of chronic health conditions. I have people who are really living paycheck to paycheck and they don’t know how to pay for their prescriptions. Or there are people who have hypertension and take their meds, but they don’t have a primary care physician. There are so many things I could mention, but the short version is that there are a lot of people who need help in managing chronic conditions.

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