Bothwell Regional Health Center completes Community Health Needs Assessment
Bothwell Regional Health Center has completed its Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA), and the findings were presented to the Bothwell Board of Trustees at its April meeting.
As a nonprofit organization, Bothwell is required by IRS tax code to conduct a CHNA every three years. The goal of the assessment is to understand progress in addressing community health needs outlined in the previous CHNA and collect current community health perceptions. Feedback allows Bothwell to understand what community members see as the most important health issues affecting their communities and provides the foundation for prioritizing health needs and developing strategies to address future needs.
The full CHNA process, which took nearly six months, involved collecting and analyzing primary data including community survey results, feedback from focus groups and hospital data, as well as secondary data derived from multiple sources on community health indicators in Pettis and Benton counties. More than 500 people completed the online survey and 31 people attended two in-person focus groups, one in Sedalia and the other in Warsaw.
Bothwell CEO Lori Wightman said that in addition to being a federal requirement, the information learned in the process and final report is vital to the organization’s future health care planning.
“Doing a health needs assessment is important because it helps us understand the specific health challenges facing our community at this point in time,” she said. “The survey answers, focus group discussions and data tell us a lot about how we’re doing and help us identify unmet needs, resource gaps and health disparities. Most importantly, it helps us pinpoint what other work needs to be done to improve the health of those in the communities we serve.”
After a review of the 2022 findings, current data, survey results and the focus group findings, the cost of health care, mental health and chronic health conditions, which include heart disease, diabetes, cancer, arthritis/joint disease, were identified as the current priority health issues in the area.
Wightman said the next step in the assessment process is developing a written implementation strategy that includes action items to help ‘move the needle’ toward improvements.
“The health issues we identified as priorities have been issues for our community for many years and are not easy to solve, “she said. “Developing an implementation strategy will help us focus on ways to create specific interventions, whether that’s increasing health education, developing new programs or services or enhancing collaborative partnerships, to continue providing access to safe care to the people we serve.”
The 2025 Community Health Needs Assessment is available on Bothwell’s website at www.brhc.org/resources/community-health-needs-assessment/. Printed copies are available at Bothwell Regional Health Center, the Sedalia Public Library, Boonslick Regional Library’s Cole Camp, Sedalia and Warsaw locations and the Donald C. Proctor Library at State Fair Community College in Sedalia.