Partnership’s Power Puts Health First
Are you healthy?
Is your family healthy?
Your neighborhood? Your town? The nation?
Measuring healthfulness has become a national sport.
Every family doctor makes a point of chiseling key health numbers into your brain.
Cholesterol count, resting heart rate, and results from prostate exam (for men) or mammogram (for women) are facts many of us can cite as easily as the birth dates of our children.
All the good work done by the family doctor and the hospitals that support them, however, misses the larger picture of what it means to be truly healthy.
The family doctor and the hospital, in truth, don’t have all that much to do with your health or mine.
A study undertaken a few months ago by the national Public Health Service recently looked at why the life expectancy of Americans as increased from 45 years in 1900 to 75 years today.
The study concluded only 5 of the additional years of life can be attributed to better medical care.
The remaining 25 years have come from better nutrition, a cleaner environment, improved housing, indoor plumbing and workplace safety.
These health factors more to do with politics, public policy, and building codes than doctors and hospitals.
When the Centers of Disease Control recently looked at the cause of every death in the nation, they concluded that 1 out of every 2 people die as the result of using tobacco or alcohol, eating the wrong stuff or becoming involved with a gun.
This perspective on healthfulness will become evident to Spokane in the next few weeks and months as more people learn about the remarkable work now under way by the Health Improvement Partnership.
The HIP, as it has become known, is a project funded by the city’s hospitals, the Spokane County Health District, and the Spokane Medical Society to improve the health of Spokane County citizens.
So far, another 70 organizations have joined the HIP to try participate together on developing a project that would truly make Spokane a healthier place to live.
In October, the HIP hopes to have completed its survey of Spokane’s overall health and will recommend a project, plan or quest than can help the city improve its health in the coming years.
The HIP participants have heard presentations from school administrators, law enforcement, developers and many others who explain how interconnected personal health, neighborhood health, political and economic health can be.
That Spokane’s hospitals and doctors are collaborating with nonmedical people to make the point that good health is more than it seems might not, at first glance, seem to make much sense.
After all, don’t hospitals and doctors make money when people are sick?
In the past, perhaps so.
But this a new, and sobering era for the health care community.
Hospitals and doctors feel the squeeze from insurance companies who don’t want to pay for long hospital stays, and from very patients who need high-cost medical care.
Together, these forces mean hospitals and docs need to cut costs and also shift resources to projects and services the public truly wants and needs.
The Health Improvement Partnership can help them do both.
The HIP can cut costs by simply making Spokane more healthy and preventing some of the more serious illnesses and accidents.
The HIP can identify possible new medical services and procedures that the public wants (and would be willing to pay for) by assessing what the public says it needs.
This component of the HIP project might lead to a greater emphasis on such things as personal health seminars, addiction treatments, preventative medicine, or research, along with traditional surgery and recuperation.
Perhaps most important, however, the HIP represents a pioneering model for collaborative community decisionmaking .
The health care industry has gone to politicians, business people, social service agencies, schools, developers and neighborhood groups and asked them to join in a community-wide project.
This collaboration, a word that can be defined as working together with an enemy or invader, probably isn’t a wholly natural act.
But it essential as the ripples from cutbacks in government and rising demands for solutions to community health problems begin to intersect.
The high potential for collaborative decision making has been detected by others in Spokane.
Collaborative projects now are under way in the city to address issues as diverse as juvenile crime (through the Communities that Care project), school achievement, (through Success by Six) and government structure (through the freeholders city-county charter.)
This willingness to sit down with a diverse, perhaps even hostile assembly, to work out a plan to serve the common good, will be extremely important to Spokane and the Inland Northwest in the coming years as resources grow thin and problems grow tall.
It’s more than HIP.
It’s the right way to make use of resources in what likely will be most challenging times.
, DataTimes MEMO: Chris Peck is the Editor of The Spokesman-Review. His column appears each Sunday.