General Information Regarding the Community Health Needs Assessment

The CHNA process should be viewed as a three-year cycle. An important part of that cycle is revisiting the progress made on priority topics from previous CHNAs. By reviewing the actions taken to address priority areas and evaluating the impact of these actions in the community, an organization can better focus and target its efforts during the next CHNA cycle.

Given below is a synopsis of the priorities that were earmarked for action by the different health agencies that constitute Hope Rising Lake County and recommended strategies. All the health topics prioritized in the previous reports coincide with the significant health needs identified in the most recent assessment.

Two types of data were used in this assessment: primary and secondary data. Primary data are data that have been collected for the purposes of this community assessment. Primary data were obtained through a community survey, focus groups, and key informant interviews. Secondary data are health indicator data that have already been collected by public sources such as government health departments. Each type of data was analyzed using a unique methodology. Findings were organized by health topics and then synthesized for a comprehensive overview of the health needs in the Hope Rising Lake County Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) Collaborative service area. An in-depth description of how this data was collected can be found in Section 3: Methodology on page 10 of the PDF report.

Several limitations of data should be considered when reviewing the findings presented in this report. Although the topics by which data are organized cover a wide range of health and health-related areas, data availability varies by health topic. Some topics contain a robust set of secondary data indicators, while others may have a limited number of indicators or limited subpopulations covered by those specific indicators. Data scores represent the relative community health need according to the secondary data for each topic and should not be considered to be a comprehensive result on their own. In addition, these scores reflect the secondary data results for the population as a whole, and do not represent the health or socioeconomic need that is much greater for some subpopulations. Moreover, many of the secondary data indicators included in the findings are collected by survey, and though specific methods are used to best represent the population at large, these measures are subject to instability, especially for smaller populations. The Index of Disparity is also limited by data availability, where indicator data varies based on the population groups and service areas being analyzed.

The secondary data presented in this report derive from multiple sources, which may present race and ethnicity data using dissimilar nomenclature. For consistency with data sources throughout the report, subpopulation data may use different terms to describe the same or similar groups of community members.

This report presents both ZIP Code and ZIP Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) data. ZIP Codes, which were created by the U.S. Postal Service to improve mail delivery service, are not reported in this assessment as they may change, include P.O. boxes or cover large unpopulated areas. This assessment cover ZCTAs or ZIP Code Tabulation Areas which were created by the U.S. Census Bureau and are generalized representations of ZIP Codes that have been assigned to census blocks. Demographics for this report are sourced from the United States Census Bureau, which presents ZCTA estimates. Tables and figures in the Demographics section of this report reference ZIP Codes in title (for purposes of familiarity) but show values of ZCTAs. Data from other sources are labeled as such.