Partnership between Local Health Departments and Hospitals Can Improve Community Health

Health Policy Article Review

1. Author’s Proposed Purpose/Goal of the Article

The intended audience of a study by Carlton and Singh (2018) was public health officials in the United States. The purpose of this study was to identify opportunities to improve the relationship between local health departments and hospitals as well as their mutual ability to collaborate effectively on hospital investments in community health initiatives.

2. Analysis of Key Issues

The key issues of interests in this study were the effectiveness of joint community health needs assessments and how they can be leveraged to improve coordination of efforts between local health departments and hospitals. The authors aggregated the results of several community health reports (i.e., the 2013 NACCHO Profile; the 2014–2015 Area Health Resource File; and the 2015 National Association of County and City Health Officials Forces of Change) and used this data to identify 439 local health departments across the country. The authors also incorporated data concerning the hospitals’ respective community benefit based on 2014 tax information (i.e., IRS Form 990, Schedule H).

The main strengths of this study included the comprehensiveness of the literature review that provided a context for the analysis as well as the robustness of the analytical model and the use of trustworthy, archived data sets that were used by the authors. In addition, the authors were meticulous in describing their methodology and providing supporting rationale for its use as well as explaining the implications of their findings for public health practitioners. Likewise, the authors provided the results of their analyses in tabular form as well as depicting them graphically to facilitate understanding. The main limitation of this study was the complexity of the analytical model and how it provided the statistical data that were needed for the purposes of the study which were likely difficult for many public health practitioners without advanced degrees in statistics to readily understand.

3. Conclusions/Findings/Assumption

Using the above-described data sets, the authors performed a series of bivariate and multivariate regression analyses to evaluate the involvement of local health departments in hospitals’ community health needs assessments as well as their corresponding community health implementation strategies with their relationship in hospital investments in community health programming. The results that emerged from this analysis showed that nearly three-quarters (316 or 72%) of the local health departments that were evaluated routinely conducted community health needs assessments but just 273 (or 62%) were involved in coordinating implementation strategies with local hospitals.

There were no biases identified in this study.

4. Personal Assessment and Reflection