SIH was joined by multiple health organizations Thursday to reveal the findings in their Community Health Needs Assessment.
The goal of the assessment is to determine the most significant health issues in the area and how to improve them.
It’s been 3 years since the last community health needs assessment and a few things have changed.
In 2013 study found that there was a need to improve the quality of care in the area.
Thursday morning the focus has now shifted to the health issues and how to make improvements from prevention to long-term treatment.
SIH Community benefits manager Angie Bailey says there are 3 major issues in Southern Illinois.
“Cancer, cardiovascular disease and mental health are our top issues”
Three different issues require three different approaches.
“Cardiovascular disease we really need to do prevention from the beginning so we want look at prevention from the beginning so we want to look at nutrition and physical activity and smoking rates and then for suicide we want to reduce the stigma of people talking to someone if there having poor emotional health and feeling overwhelmed or stressed and cancer we really want to improve screening rates.”
Dr. Al Badarin with Prairie Cardiovascular says mortality rates associated with cardiovascular issues are down more than 30% over the last decade, but they’re still claiming more lives than all types of cancer combined.
“We lose a life due to cardiovascular disease every 80 seconds here in this country so there’s a lot more work here to be done.”
All together there’s over 400 partners in this coalition to help improve everyone’s life in southern Illinois.
SIH Cancer Institute will also be starting a new lung cancer-screening program aimed at discovering lung cancer in the early stages while it’s still operable.
