Effingham County residents can voice their concerns about health issues at a town hall meeting.

 

The state of Effingham’s health town hall meeting will be held July 12 at Effingham Hospital at 6:30 p.m. It’s part of the Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships process, led by Russ Toal of Georgia Southern University’s Jiann-Piang Hsu College of Public Health.

 

“It is to give people who have not heard of the MAPP process the chance to learn more about it,” said Betty Dixon, clinical nurse manager for the Coastal Health District. “If it’s a concern to the community, then that’s a concern.”

 

The deadline to RSVP for the town hall meeting at 754-6850 is today.

 

“The purpose of the MAPP process is to get people engaged into how they can make their community better. Maybe in the future, if the momentum is there, this will be something they can act on, and the health care community and other interested people can use that momentum to resolve that particular problem.”

 

Georgia Southern University won a grant to look at public and community health and chose to look at Effingham and Bulloch counties. The goal, said Dixon, is to engage the community and different stakeholders.

 

“Anybody can be a stakeholder. Anybody can come up and say, ‘I am concerned about hypertension,’” she said. “Or maybe the local hospital can say they notice a lot of cancer in the community. Someone else can say, ‘I have a special needs child.’”

 

The MAPP project has created five work groups, each based on an area of concern, and has had several meetings. The town hall meeting also will give participants the opportunity to bring up issues that the MAPP process may not have taken into consideration.

 

The five issues that have been identified are access to preventive health services, such as breast cancer screenings; obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and special needs services; smoking, alcohol and substance abuse; teen suicide and injury prevention; and teen pregnancy.

 

“If more people had mammograms, then we could detect breast cancer earlier, and the devastation of breast cancer would not be what it is now,” Dixon said. “There are so many people who don’t have mammograms.”

 

In the past, health officials have handed statistics, such as teen pregnancy rates, to MAPP meeting participants, allowing them to compare those figures to state and national averages. The input from the MAPP process could help the hospital, health department and others devise plans and programs to combat those issues.

 

“It’s a huge community strategic plan,” Dixon said. “What other communities have done, they have been able to go after additional external funding sources to get what they need to address the problems.”

 

While the MAPP in Effingham is focused on community health needs, in Wisconsin, the MAPP process was used to look at problems in Milwaukee and Los Angeles also has undergone the MAPP process. In some cities, poverty and a lack of jobs has been seen as a problem.

 

The MAPP process, which started in May, will last until September. Information generated by the process will be given to community leaders to help determine what’s next.

 

“The next steps are to listen what people have to say about these five broad areas and then determine if we want to look at all five or do we want to focus on one of them,” Dixon said.