Supporting Healthy Communities: WRI’s Partnerships with Regional Hospital Networks on Community Health Needs Assessments and Addressing Community Needs
Authors: Devon Ziminski, Natalie Passov
As part of WRI’s 25th anniversary activities, we are highlighting a series of collaborations with our partners in the South Jersey region and across the State. We’re celebrating National Public Health Week by sharing our fruitful partnerships with AtlantiCare and Inspira Health. WRI has collaborated with both health systems over the years to support them in investigating community needs in the counties they serve: Atlantic, Cumberland, Gloucester, and Salem. To that end, WRI leads the development of each system’s Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNA), with the shared goal of providing actionable information for improving health at the community level. WRI takes a community-focused approach to this process, engaging in surveys, focus groups, and interviews to capture community perspectives and voice.
Devon Ziminski, lead researcher for both CHNAs, interviewed Samantha Kiley, Vice President for Community Health and Social Impact at AtlantiCare and Donald Noblett, Administrative Director of the Community Impact Department at Inspira Health to hear about their experiences working with WRI and how this research partnership and the community health assessments they produce drive critical planning and decision-making processes.
How do Inspira and AtlantiCare work with WRI? What does that partnership look like?
Sam: AtlantiCare partners with WRI to conduct and pull together our community health needs assessment. And we work in partnership to complete that assessment through a series of interviews, surveys, and focus groups.
Donald: Inspira Health also works with WRI to do our tri-annual community health needs assessment. We’ve worked with them for several rounds and we’re excited to have the finished results coming soon for our 2025 to 2027 CHNA.
How do both your organizations use the information from the CHNAs? How does it inform your work, the decision-making at your organization, and what’s next in terms of programmatic decisions or allocating resources?
Sam: So, for Atlanticare, the CHNA conveniently aligns with our triennial organizational strategy that we update. And so, it helps inform what the basic community needs are, gives nuance to community concerns and community requests, and also helps us understand how and what we need to be working on to address those community needs.
Donald: Similarly, for Inspira, I feel really proud of the ways that we not only accomplish the requirement of doing a CHNA, but it’s meaningful and it does influence kind of the direction that we head and ways that we invest to try to remove barriers that are expressed by community members. And two really solid examples that are operational now are our Community Health Worker (CHW) program and our Food Farmacies, which both started in response to the great need for help accessing basic needs and addressing social determinants of health. And that has really been a great pathway for patients to address basic needs and then receive health care. It comes back to our investment in the work with the CHNA and then how we respond after hearing the community voice.
WRI is currently working with both organizations on the 2025-2027 CHNAs. We have just completed Inspira’s CHNA, and for Atlanticare, we’re in the data gathering stage. In Inspira’s case, what are some of the ideas that your organization might have about addressing some of these community issues that have come up or – in the case of AtlantiCare – the main concerns you heard in the last CHNA that you’re working to address?
Donald: I think a big one that stands out as a contrast from previous times is cost of living being a major issue in addition to and separate from cost and availability of healthcare. Inspira in the past few years has been investing in either partnerships [to address cost of living/housing] or now a program called the Homelessness Prevention Initiative where we’re trying to help prevent homelessness before it happens. Again, it’s kind of extending beyond just traditional healthcare and figuring out how can we partner, how can we lead to make sure the people in our community who are dealing with this increased cost of living can still prioritize their health. Even preventative care, right? The things that would potentially go on the back burner if they’re struggling to put food on the table or pay bills. It’s been meaningful to kind of see in real time the information come through.
Sam: For us, we’ve heard key concerns around mental health and substance use challenges and access to services across our community [in Atlantic County]. There continued to be themes over the course of the various years that we’ve had to conduct the survey. I think equally we’ve heard loud and clear from the community around their interest in – really before they were called social determinants of health formally – many of the social issues and barriers that prevent them from being able to take care of themselves. And that really impedes health. And so, for years, we’ve heard about transportation challenges. And food challenges. More recently, I think in our 2019-2021 assessment, we heard a lot about housing. And this has really been an informative way for us to begin to build our strategies and our efforts to address some of these topics. Like Donald, I think that we’re going to continue to hear about affordability. We heard some of it in our last assessment (2022-2024), and I think that will only be magnified in this [upcoming 2025-2027] assessment as well.
Donald: Another way that Inspira works very closely with WRI is on a number of research investigations. We are currently wrapping one up about colorectal cancer screening disparities that exist in Salem and Cumberland counties. Our goals are to get a better understanding of what barriers exist for community members; assess the current understanding of the importance of preventative cancer screenings; and then increase awareness and access to screening services for everyone. Seeing the tremendous amount of collaboration that goes into pulling together the data, and then seeing the measurable outcomes of our interventions motivate our team. Bringing about a positive change in behavior, such as adherence to cancer screening guidelines, is a tangible step toward creating healthier communities. And, to be able to measure it, quantify it and then highlight it is very exciting.
From an Inspira standpoint, it’s been really affirming to see the fruit of our collective work. By conducting this kind of research, we’ve been able to highlight our success at the state and, in some cases, the national level. Opportunities to showcase this work at the national level speak to the importance of the work and the value of our partnership. I really appreciate the WRI team and their willingness to help us dig in and uncover the measurable outcomes from the work we’re doing.
Conclusion
Many of the social determinants of health discussed in the CHNAs address large issues like cost of living, transportation, and food access – all of which affect public health. As we honor this week and celebrate our partnerships, we look forward to continuing to collaborate with Inspira Health, AtlantiCare, and other regional organizations to learn from our communities about ways to address urgent health needs.
The Inspira Health 2025-2027 CHNA will be released later this month in April 2025. The AtlantiCare 2025-2027 CHNA is currently in data collection – with a report forthcoming in Winter 2025/Early 2026.
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