Detroit Community Health Improvement Process

The Detroit Community Health Improvement Process brings key stakeholders within the local public health system together to work with the community to improve the health and well-being of those who live, work, play, and pray in the City of Detroit. The Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships (MAPP) process (left), which was developed by the National Association for City and County Health Officials (NACCHO), was used as the framework for the Detroit Community Health Improvement Process. This framework was chosen because it is rooted in community engagement and it provides for an interactive process that can be used to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and performance of the local public health system. This process includes both the Community Health Assessment and the Community Health Improvement Plan

Community Health Assessment

The Community Health Assessment (CHA), which was conducted in 2018, includes the first four phases of the MAPP process:

1. Organize for Success and Partnership Development - Organizing and engaging community partners that would advise this process and building an internal team at DHD that would be responsible for making sure that the process is implemented.
2. Visioning - Working with the community to answer the question "What does a healthy Detroit mean to you?"
3. Four MAPP Assessments - These assessments collected different types of data about community health and worked with residents and community partners to answer the following questions:
   1. What is important to our community?
   2. How is quality of life perceived in our community?
   3. What assets do we have that can be used to improve community health?
   4. What are the components, activities, competencies, and capacities of our local public health system?
   5. How are the Essential Services being provided to our community?
   6. How healthy are our residents?
   7. What does the health status of our community look like?
   8. What is occurring or might occur that affects the health of our community or the local public health system?
   9. What specific threats or opportunities are generated by these occurrences?
4. Identify Strategic Issues - Information will be used to developed six community health goals and these goals will be ranked to determine the top three that would be the focus of the Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP)

During the CHA, we will work with community organizations, leaders, and residents to complete the first four phases of the MAPP process and answer the above key questions. Community engagement efforts involved community meetings, a youth visioning activity, a social media campaign, and community toolkits. Data collection efforts will include data walks, a youth photovoice project, focus groups, interviews, and an issue prioritization survey. We also worked with the University of Michigan Poverty Solutions to add questions to their Detroit Metro Area Community Study (DMACS) Survey, which collected information from 1,200 Detroiters about their experiences and needs related to health.

For more detailed information on the CHA and the data that was collected during this process, please use the links below.

2018 Detroit Community Health Assessment
Detroit Metro Area Community Study (DMACS) Survey
Detroit Open Data Portal

Community Health Improvement Plan

The development and implementation of the Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP) includes the last two phases of the MAPP process:

5. Formulate Goals and Strategies – Developing an action plan, which includes goals, objectives, strategies, and metrics, for addressing each of the strategic issues that were identified through the CHA.
6. Action Cycle – Links planning, implementation, and evaluation. This is the phase of the process in which we implement the CHIP strategies and evaluate them.

The CHIP will be a community-wide strategic plan developed, supported, and implemented by partner organizations, agencies, and community members. The goal of the CHIP is to improve health outcomes and reduce health disparities in Detroit that were identified by the community in the CHA.