NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — The Reno County Health Department is conducting a Community Health Assessment this month.
"We need people to take the assessment," said DJ Gering with the Health Department. "It gets harder to do the assessment when we get a lot of refusals, because we have to select alternate addresses. Every time we select an alternate address, we're implementing some type of human intervention into the survey."
Gering said its important that the example represent the whole community.
"Females are more likely to take surveys more than men," Gering said. "Retired households are more likely to take surveys than unretired households. The more we have to select alternate addresses, the more likely we are to get these populations that are inclined to take a survey. It can skew the results. We have to keep that in mind when we look at them and before we make decisions."
The decisions, though, are about the aggregate, you don't need to be afraid of personally identifying information being out there from this survey.
"Our objective is to have at least 180 respondents out of the 210 households that were selected," said Elliott Koester with the Health Department. "With this information, we get a generalized concept of how the public perceives the community and the other types of questions we ask. With that information, that allows the Reno County Health Department, along with many of our community partners, both primary care and non primary care, to make better decisions to better the community."
The last assessment took place in 2019 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.