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State Health Assessment

State Health Assessment2023-05-10T08:59:38-07:00

Building a Shared Understanding of the Public Health Landscape in California

The State Health Assessment (SHA) provides a snapshot of health for the entire population, across a range of conditions and factors. Let’s Get Healthy California – the SHA – leverages a broad range of information to identify key health issues and contributing factors, elevate trends and disparities, and identify assets and resources that can be mobilized to address these issues. The SHA provides a strong foundation to inform program and policy planning and development.

Iterative Statewide Collaborative Process

This comprehensive process incorporates a wide-range of inputs – both qualitative and quantitative – to provide a deeper understanding of the health of California and identify and prioritize opportunities for population health improvement. The state health improvement plan (SHIP) is then updated to build upon those opportunities by establishing shared priorities and identifying strategies designed to achieve measurable improvements on prioritized health issues.

Process of the State Health Assessment & Improvement Plan

Comparative analysis across a range of data sources provides a foundational understanding of the population health status in California (including leading causes of death and disability, contributing factors, trends and disparities). The process also leverages and builds on other key findings from complimentary assessments to broaden that lens. Stewards provide contextual information beyond the data and share insights for interpretation and presentation.

Consideration of external forces of change – such as new and emerging State and National priorities and strategic initiatives and shifts in budget and policy that may have implications on population health – are reviewed as a key input to inform the assessment and prioritization process.

One key aspect to conducting a comprehensive and meaningful health assessment is gaining deeper insights into what is going on in the communities and why. It is important to garner community feedback that reflects the unique needs of California’s diverse population. Local community health assessments and improvement plans – led by local health jurisdictions in collaboration with communities and cross-sector partners – serve as an extension to the state level assessment process. Reviews of additional policy agendas and action plans developed by local public health programs, tribal health jurisdictions, and other community organizations also serve as a valuable input for surfacing community identified priorities and issues. The synthesized information is shared back with these partners to confirm understanding and garner additional insights.

Population health is affected by a complex web of conditions and factors that span beyond the traditional health sector. The process includes activities – such as reviews of key programmatic plans and frameworks, research on major initiatives, capturing promising and best practices, and surveying and strategy mapping – to consider existing assets and capacity and promote alignment across strategies, actions and resources.

A wide-range of stakeholders representing various partners across sectors, populations, community organizations provide essential input to inform and advance the state health assessment and improvement plan. A range of formal and in-formal engagement activities occur throughout the year – including meetings and engagement sessions, key informant interviews, surveys and convenings – in order to confirm and validate health issues, identify potential gaps, inform priorities and indicator selection, identify assets and resources, and recommend future direction for ongoing assessment and implementation. Stakeholder input also offers a lens for assessing significance, relevance, and capacity of key themes that emerge through other facets of the assessment process.

Iterative Statewide Collaborative Process

This comprehensive process incorporates a wide-range of inputs – both qualitative and quantitative – to provide a deeper understanding of the health of California and identify and prioritize opportunities for population health improvement. The state health improvement plan (SHIP) is then updated to build upon those opportunities by establishing shared priorities and identifying strategies designed to achieve measurable improvements on prioritized health issues.

Status Health icon

A wide range of additional inputs were leveraged to provide a broader understanding of perspectives in understanding the health landscape in California. This included review of over a dozen national and state frameworks with a particular emphasis on identification of priority health issues focused on equity. Consideration of external forces of change in the policy landscape were also reviewed through the analysis process.

Review Priorities icon

A wide range of additional inputs were leveraged to provide a broader understanding of perspectives in understanding the health landscape in California. This included review of over a dozen national and state frameworks with a particular emphasis on identification of priority health issues focused on equity. Consideration of external forces of change in the policy landscape were also reviewed through the analysis process.

Identify Issues icon

A key aspect of conducting a comprehensive and meaningful state health assessment is gaining deeper insights into what is going on in the communities and why. It was important to garner community feedback that reflected the unique needs of California’s diverse population. CDPH leveraged the direct relationships that our Local Health Department partners have with their communities to surface community identified priorities and issues. Using their processes as an extension of ours, the CDPH reviewed a sample of 22 LHD community health assessments and 20 community health improvement plans. This sample was diverse in nature – spanning across the state; including northern, bay, central valley, and southern counties and reflecting small, medium and large and both rural and urban populations.

Human Services icon

Multisector input was collected from state government departments across California Health and Human Services Agency to identify opportunities to strengthen alignment around shared priorities. Information was submitted by 11 departments on current priorities and major areas of work as well as identified areas of alignment with current LGHC indicators.

Collect Feedback icon

To select priorities for the plan, hundreds of stakeholders all across California were invited to participate in a structured process to review the SHA findings and inform priorities. Stakeholders representing a variety of partners, populations, health and community organizations participated in the process, resulting in the selection of priorities for the plan. Based on this multifaceted analytic and stakeholder planning process, new topics and metrics were identified to enhance the LGHC framework for the next stage of the health improvement planning process.

Assessment Highlights

Core Module

The State Health Assessment Core Module is an annual analysis that provides a snapshot of the health status of California based on a standard set of measures.

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State of Public Health

The State of Public Health includes an annual testimony and biennial report, provided to the California State Legislature, to elevate public health issues and inform policy.

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API Data Brief

The Asian and Pacific Islander (API) Data Brief includes a collection of fact sheets that highlight various health indicators disaggregated by Asian and Pacific Islander groups.

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Connect and Engage

Want to engage around community health assessment?

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We aim to make California the healthiest state by advancing the Triple Aim of better health, better care, and lower cost. We promote health equity, leverage data and catalyze innovation, and work together to make a collective impact on the overall health of our state!

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