Tri-County Community Health Needs Assessment - old D7 webform

In 2016, for the first time in their histories, Roper St. Francis Healthcare, MUSC Health, and Trident United Way joined forces to assess the health and wellness of the community collaboratively. From the Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) came the Healthy Tri-County (HTC) organization, a multi-sector regional initiative powered by Trident United Way in partnership with core partners MUSC Health and Roper St. Francis Healthcare, to improve health outcomes in Berkeley, Charleston and Dorchester counties in South Carolina. The vision of HTC is to improve the health and well-being of every person and community within the Tri-County region. To date, 73 organizations have become formal HTC members and about 1,100 individuals interact with network activities and resources.

While all not-for-profit hospitals are required to develop this report in compliance with the Affordable Care Act, we believe this collaborative work also represents a larger part of our purpose to make every healthcare moment matter for our patients, teammates and neighbors.

To create greater impact, we collectively remain committed to reassessing the community’s priorities every three years and will continue to design programs and services that complement and supplement one another’s efforts.

While working to identifying health priorities, Healthy Tri-County also strives to promote equitable health outcomes and considers the impact of social determinants in the development of all materials, plans and reports. HTC workgroups and subcommittees adopted the health equity principles of the Alliance for a Healthier SC.

• Health is more than health care. Social conditions are just as important to health as medical care.
• Health is tied directly to the distribution of resources. The single strongest predictor of our health is our position on the class pyramid.
• Racism imposes an added health burden. Ongoing discrimination in housing, jobs and education.
• The choices we make are shaped by the choices we have. Unhealthy social and environmental factors often shape unhealthy behaviors.

The Core Partners of Healthy Tri-County would like to extend a special thank-you to all the community partners who participated in our data collection process and shared the 2019 CHNA survey within their networks. We also could not have completed this work without the diligence and insight of the HTC Health Data Workgroup, who worked tirelessly to update the survey and conduct many focus groups and interviews.

No single organization, no matter how well-resourced or powerful, can improve health outcomes and disparities alone. Therefore, the partner organizations are committed to working together to achieve a broad, sustainable impact on our region’s health rather than an isolated impact.

We’re better together!