CHOP (Community Health & Obesity Prevention) is a collaborative effort created in March 2013 after a Community Health Assessment that was carried out by Memorial Hospital and WMVHC identified that obesity is a significant problem in our community. Medical professionals from Memorial Hospital, doctor’s offices and other health care organizations in the Mount Washington Valley came together to work on how they can improve health care services for people in the Mount Washington Valley. Murray Wellness Center, chairman of the governing board of the council, said the group initially came together informally, “to look at how can we better communicate with each other and see what the overall needs are for the community and how do we address those needs, with what the community has to offer now, and what we need and what can we improve on.”
In looking at those needs, both locally and within the state, the group identified a number of health issues, including chronic pain management, chronic disease, substance abuse, mental health services, obesity, and care for the aging population, that affect a large part of the local population. CHOP is a sub-committee that main focus is obesity prevention. Community Health and obesity prevention (CHOP) was created in March 2013. The new Committee started by creating a collaborative effort focusing on our collective knowledge and strengths. Our Agenda, was to go in with no agenda, listen to what our peers, and community felt where important, educate ourselves and each other. Then join together and create a common agenda. The first 6 months we where very busy and motivated each other to move forward. Here is an outline on our first 6 months:
CHOP
First meeting was March 25th
15 members from our community attended our first meeting: Doctors, nurses, teachers, mental healthcare providers, dieticians, and others. We have had people from “HEAL”, and “Let’s move” come to talk with us on what they are doing and how they can help us. Cyndi Paulin has been coming to our meetings and has helped give us ideas since she has her health and Wellness program going on at “Carroll County United.”
Trish and Cyndi who both have experience in collective impact have been able to help guide our group in a constant moving direction towards finding our common agenda. During our April Meeting we decided to have a group of us put together some questions to ask our school aged children in our community. We had about 16 questions and in the end we had answers from 546 students from all grade levels from Bartlett, Tamworth, Madison, Freedom the middle school and High School! Susan Ruka right know is helping us with figuring out how to read this data in order to get the best use out of it. Once we explored our community and listened to all of the organizations that are working towards preventing obesity and a healthy life style. We finally felt we were able to all work together and come up with our Common Agenda. So we left our June meeting with each of us having homework for our June Appointment:
Imagine what a perfect community would look like to you? OR:
What are you hoping that this group accomplishes for our community? On Our July First meeting we broke up into groups and each had a turn discussing how we answered these questions. We looked at one things overlapped and what didn’t with the other group members. Then we all came to the agreement of what our new Common Agenda would be:
CHOP
Community Health & Obesity Prevention
"Foster our Sense of Community to Promote Education, and Communication Toward Optimal Health and Wellness."
