Mayor Sharon Weston Broome released the 2018 Community Health Needs Assessment today, outlining where and how East Baton Rouge Parish needs improvement.
Baton Rouge’s 2018 CHNA identified 10 top community needs for East Baton Rouge Parish which include access to care, mental health and substance abuse, healthy living, sexually transmitted infections, cancer prevention, cardiovascular disease and stroke prevention, diabetes prevention, healthy babies and injury prevention.
Broome’s Healthy City Initiative, HealthyBR, will focus on these 10 items for the next three years.
“HealthyBR is now in a pivotal position to improve the health and well-being of residents through a renewed focus on the key drivers of population health in Baton Rouge,” says Broome in a statement.
To come up with the list, HealthyBR convened a CHNA work group that consisted of representatives from the major hospitals in the area, the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Baton Rouge Health District, Louisiana Public Health Institute, East Baton Rouge Parish Library, and the HIV/AIDS Alliance for Region 2.
This group collected data from more than 30 local and national sources and consulted experts for the assessment. Also, in partnership with the East Baton Rouge Parish Library, 500 residents from every zip code in the parish were surveyed. They then ranked the top 10 health needs in the parish.
HealthyBR is now working to create an implementation plan to address the top four needs—access to care, behavioral health, healthy living, and sexually transmitted infections/HIV—which will be uploaded to the HealthyBR website and regularly updated.
