1 of 1

Alia Alaraj, Eman Alsamara, Nikhaule Martin, Jessica Miller, and Lekita Spivey

University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health | Chicago, Illinois

Organizing as a Public Health Strategy: Building Power For Health Equity

CHE Cook County works accordingly with different organizations in efforts of changing “the maldistribution of money, power, and resources that produces this gross injustice”. They work to create change by raising awareness, advancing policy, and building power by focusing on the root causes of health inequities. The following data collected will be used by CHE Cook County to potentially provide better recommendations to the counties and health systems surveyed.

After reviewing the IPLAN reports of various counties by specific key terms: health equity, community engagement, and power, we noticed that they all appear to have similar goals of making health equity a strategic priority. However, these terms have a different understanding in each of the strategic plans, but this doesn't deter from the overarching goal of these counties surrounding the improvement of health equity. For example, in the plans, health equity is described as accessibility, awareness, and effectiveness. Health equity is becoming a priority for the counties because they are identifying health disparities that exist in their communities while learning about the precise needs and assets of the people who face disparities by coming up with concrete actions that aim to close these gaps. Once health equity is established, everything else follows: community engagement, organizing and economic growth. For health equity to advance across counties, it's necessary to dedicate power and financial resources to keep the plans in action.

Outcomes

  • The counties assessed have made an effort to address health inequity to some capacity.
  • Healthy Chicago 2.0 promises to make health equity a priority, as well as Lake County- who not only prioritizes health equity, but promises to address the issues of health inequity.
  • Cook, DuPage, and Will County all mention health equity in regards to plans for the future. Community engagement; as mentioned by DuPage, CCHHS and Will, is prioritized by way of engaging staff members and members of the county government to collectively make health related decisions.
  • Only the City of Chicago and Lake focused on community engagement by engaging community residents with organizations and initiatives.
  • Nowhere in any of the County or Health Systems strategic plans was the distribution of power made a focus.
  • All the decision making that was taken place was only in the hands of the local government and organizations in charge.
  • Although all of the areas analyzed seemed to focus on achieving health equity and in some capacity community engagement, they fail to thoroughly adopt the bottom up approach needed to engage community residents with the initiatives and goals set in place.

​

Results

Qualitative analysis

Dissected the strategic plans and completed Initial searches for mentions of concepts of interest in the strategic plans.

​

Developed a codebook

Discussed in-text examples to calibrate our qualitative coding scheme and systematically coded strategic plans for the three concepts of interest: Health Equity-BLUE, Community Engagement-PINK (How) & GREEN (What), Power- YELLOW

​

Created an annotated PDF for each IPLAN and analyzed findings using a set of criteria.

How are the three key terms being used? How are local health departments solving health disparities? What is the role of community and power in the process? How are each of these thematic codes being discussed? How does the Local Health Department understand their own work to address health problems?

�

​

Methods

Background

Chicago Department of Public Health, Strategic Plan 2020.

Collaborative for Health Equity-Cook County

DuPage County Strategic Plan 2015

Impact 2020 CCHHS Strategic Plan 2017-2019

Lake County Health Department 2017-2019 Strategic Plan

Will County 2015 MAPP/IPLAN

​

​

​

References

Reviewed IPLAN reports completed by the City of Chicago, Cook County Health and Hospital Systems, DuPage County, Lake County, and Will County. The frequency of key terms mentioned were compared to determine what the counties are doing to address health inequity. The terms that were explored were community engagement, power, and health equity.

Aims

The success and outcome of this project required a lot of guidance and assistance. We would like to thank our project guides Jim Bloyd and Alicia Riley of CHE Cook County, as well as Ebony Hagler from SOUL and Mary Claire Schmit from CTU for taking a keen interest in our project by giving us the necessary information to develop a good product. All that we have done is only due to such supervision and assistance, and we appreciate them for the knowledge we obtained during the process.

Acknowledgements