|
Key Health Issues in Norfolk |
Background
The Norfolk Department of Public Health (NDPH), in collaboration with a Community Advisory Board, is leading a community health planning process called Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships—also called MAPP. The purpose of MAPP is to engage community members and partners in conducting a series of four assessments to identify important issues that they can address collectively. Through these four assessments, we have identified eight key issues (described below).
We would like to get your feedback on which of these issues are the most important to focus community health improvement efforts on in the coming 3-5 years. Please share your feedback in this survey – which should take less than 2 minutes.
Key Health Issues in Norfolk
We would like to get your feedback on which of these issues are the most important to focus community health improvement efforts on in the coming 3-5 years. Please share your feedback in this survey – which should take less than 2 minutes.
Key Health Issues in Norfolk
- Safe communities: High rates of crime and violence impact how safe residents feel in their neighborhoods and prevents them from accessing outdoor physical activity opportunities, taking care of their neighborhoods, and creates a lack of community feeling.
- Workforce and economic development: Residents want jobs that support healthful living. At the same time, there is low job creation, pay compression, and talent flight.
- Accessing places and services to stay healthy: While there are places to exercise and seek care, community members report having trouble accessing these places for a variety of reasons, including affordability, accessibility, location, and safety.
- Communication and collaboration among partners and the public: The strength of multiple complex resources and many partners working on connected issues can create challenges related to information, data, communication, and resource sharing. Ultimately, this dynamic can affect the successful execution of programs as well as the coordination, communication and accountability among partners. This is a problem for local and regional efforts.
- Mental health: Residents and community partners express strong concern for mental health issues, as well as the inability to access mental health services and medications.
- Chronic disease prevention: Chronic illnesses, including obesity, heart disease, and cancer, impact the health of the community.
- Sexual health: Norfolk has high rates of sexually transmitted infections and teen pregnancy that particularly affect the health of black residents.
- Smoking, drugs, and alcohol: Smoking, drugs and alcohol are unhealthy behaviors that affect individual health and contribute to residents’ feelings of safety within their neighborhoods.
Social determinants such as large pockets of poverty, lack of affordable housing, and geographic, racial and educational disparities create a fragmented community and also impact overall health and quality of life as well.