The San Luis Obispo County Public Health Department has released the county’s first-ever community health improvement plan.
Public health officials reportedly worked with more than 95 partners in the non-profit, health care, and governmental sectors to come up with the five-year plan. The goal — “ensuring all San Luis Obispo County residents have the opportunity to be healthy.”
The plan identifies eight priority areas and major goals for each:
- Access to care
- Improve coordination of health care among service providers
- Increase the proportion of low-income children in SLO County with routine and adequate dental care
- Recruit and retain providers to the Central Coast
- Social determinants of health
- Increase CalFresh enrollment to reduce hunger and improve health among SLO County residents
- Improve access to affordable, attainable, safe and supportive housing
- Maternal, child and adolescent health
- Improve social and emotional support for new mothers
- Implement a Help Me Grow system in SLO County
- Infectious disease
- Reduce the rate of undiagnosed hepatitis C in SLO County Jail inmate population
- Reduce the rate of influenza in high-risk SLO County populations
- Reduce the rate of syphilis in SLO County population
- Chronic disease and health behaviors
- Improve diets and increase physical activity in the environments where people eat, live, learn, work, and play
- Reduce rates of chronic disease among county residents
- Reduce smoking initiation, tobacco use, and exposure to secondhand smoke
- Injuries
- Reduce falls among seniors
- Reduce vehicle-related injuries
- Social and emotional wellness
- Improve consistency of care across the continuum of social and emotional wellness services
- Improve the social and emotional support network for teens in SLO County
- Environment
- Increase awareness of Valley Fever within the agriculture community
- Improve water quality at high priority beach/creek interfaces
To read the full plan, click here.
The Public Health Department says it will release a report on the progress toward its goals each year.
