Health library

Beyond our primary mission to provide affordable, quality medical care, we believe our responsibility to the community extends beyond the doors of our hospital or clinics. Grande Ronde Hospital, Inc. (GRH) continues to use our time, talent and treasure to benefit Union County in other ways.

We proactively seek partnerships with agencies and community groups to collaborate on how we can, collectively and individually, work to make our cities healthier, safer and happier. In 2010, we began publishing annual reports just like this one to showcase our efforts.

Long before it was required by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), we created programs and financed projects for the greater benefit of Union County. ACA rules may have made the process more complex and time-consuming, but the end goal remains the same. We have become more deeply committed to meeting our communities’ needs as requirements become increasingly complicated and labor-intensive each year. As we have incorporated these new rules, we have also learned a lot about our organization and its people, about our communities, and about the value of our community partners.

Our most recent Community Health Needs Assessment (Assess-ment) was completed in May 2015, after months of hard work by our Community Benefit Sub-Committee (Committee) over the winter. Two previous Assessments (2010 and 2013) did not reveal the broad demographic information we had hoped for, so we were resolved to make the 2015 Assessment the most inclusive assessment yet.

We began by forming a Health Needs Assessment Task Force (Task Force) composed of 35 community members representing 16 public, private, government and faith-based entities. That list is included in this report. Modeling survey instruments used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Task Force developed an Assessment tool covering a broad spectrum of physical, mental and behavioral health, as well as quality-of-life related issues.

The Committee also engaged the services of the Hospital Council of Northwest Ohio (HCNO), which had previously worked with peer hospitals in our region, to guide the Assessment’s development, as well as to administer and compile the results. Surveys were conducted from September through December 2015 and focused on adults age 19 and older throughout Union County. The HCNO also integrated sources of state and federal data with the final results.

Those results, along with an extensive data analysis, were shared in a final report titled “Union County Community Health Status Assessment 2015” at a public event held in La Grande in April 2016. Attendance more than met our expectations. We were inspired by the enthusiasm and diversity of the group’s feedback during and after the presentation.

We have been able to use all of this insight in developing an implementation strategy, which will guide our community benefit efforts in fiscal year 2018. At that point, we start the process all over again.

The current Assessment is available on our corporate website at www.grh.org/about-us/community-benefit.