Public Health System Transformation Update Newsletter
July 2024 | View all system transformation newsletters

Arrowhead region: Building a strong foundation for data-informed planning, communications, and decision-making 

Carlton-Cook-Lake-St. Louis Community Health Board creates a regional data, planning, and communications team

Even though public health experts can (and do) harness population health data to support the health and wellness of their communities, having access to good data isn’t enough. Agencies and staff need the tools to put data into practice, using it for data-informed decision-making, evaluation, competitive funding applications, and everyday work.

The Carlton-Cook-Lake-St. Louis Community Health Board has developed a regional data, planning, and communications team, which supports the building blocks of public health practice across programs and jurisdictions. This team builds cohesion and continuity across areas that might not otherwise be directly linked programmatically on the back end, but are perceived by the public on the front end as a single public health entity, and need to engage the public and communicate with consistency.

This type of capacity-building helps “glue” a department’s programs, activities, and topics together—in Carlton-Cook-Lake-St. Louis’ case, through activities like hosting a regional data equity training, using the We All Count data equity framework for the regional Bridge to Health community health assessment survey, initiating a data inventory, and identifying shared regional indicators for the community health board’s community health improvement plan.

Strengthening a health agency’s connective tissue in these ways requires investment—in the staff and time required to collect, analyze, interpret, share, and make decisions with data; in creating policies and expectations to apply data ethically and consistently; in training staff to ensure everyone’s operating within the same set of roles, responsibilities, and expectations; and more.

How does this project center equity? Carlton-Cook-Lake-St. Louis Community Health Board staff have learned to build equity into their work from the ground up so that it’s not just a buzzword, but leads to meaningful change—staff work with partners to ensure everyone is “speaking the same language” when it comes to data, so that data better reflects community priorities and decisions.

What could other agencies learn from this? It’s vital that public health agencies listen to communities and ask questions before and during planning, and not just at the end—engaging populations in a meaningful way helps ensure they’re reflected in the end product. By bringing communities along during planning, public health agencies can build public trust and support not just for their agency, but for the field of public health as a whole.

Visit this project online

• Building public health infrastructure (Carlton-Cook-Lake-St. Louis)
• Let's modernize public health together (Carlton-Cook-Lake-St. Louis)

Related

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• Minnesota Infrastructure Fund Projects: Local Innovation, Big Transformation

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