Community health improvement effort will focus on housing, access, mental health and substance use

Local health care leaders and experts will spend the coming months brainstorming solutions to improve housing stability, health care access and resources for mental health and substance use.

Those three topics will be the focus of a five-year health improvement plan for Marion and Polk counties following a health assessment done by local agencies.

Officials from Salem Health, PacificSource and Willamette Health Council met with Marion and Polk county health departments Feb. 20 to review the assessment and start the work on creating solutions.

A report from a survey and focus groups highlighted how the top issues impact people in the Salem area.

“I experienced people running into doctors who, as soon as they’re honest about their substance use, they feel judged and that can make them not want to go back to any doctor or professional. You know, they want to feel safe,” one focus group participant said.

The room at Chemeketa Community College’s Eola campus in West Salem was filled with dozens of the region’s health officials as agency leaders shared findings from a collaborative effort to improve community health.

The group, called the Marion-Polk Community Health Collaborative, started in 2008 and studies health needs and works with partners to implement solutions. It includes representatives from government and health agencies, hospital systems and community nonprofits.

Every five years, the collaborative produces a community assessment and an improvement plan identifying three health priorities and ways to address them.

In the previous health improvement plan, which was for 2021-2025, the priorities were housing, substance use and behavioral health support.

In an online dashboard, data shows that several goals from the last plan were achieved, including decreasing high school marijuana use, decreasing suicide rates and adding mental health providers.

But the similar list of priorities for the next five years shows much work remains to be done.

Many people in Marion and Polk counties believe their communities suffer from a lack of mental health resources, according to data the collaborative collected last year.

Participants described stress, isolation and being part of an underserved community as a few of the barriers to accessing better care for their mental and physical health.

The assessment found that respondents ranked mental health as the most important health condition to them, followed by substance use.

“If we could put counseling, not schedulers, but real counselors into classrooms, even at the early grades with group activities. I think it would do so much for children and families,” one participant at an input session said.

The new assessment will be finalized in early spring and used to design the collaborative’s health improvement plan for 2026-2030. The plan will use the three priorities identified by the assessment to set goals and identify solutions for community partners to implement.

Officials from Marion County and Willamette Health Council spoke at the meeting about the collaborative’s effort to reach diverse communities, including at-risk youth, refugees, deaf and blind people and farmworkers.

One attendee discussed the importance of collaboration between large health care systems and resources within smaller communities like Indigenous tribes.

In a report on the data collection, the collaborative featured quotes from participants highlighting how people are affected by a lack of access to health care.

“Last year I lost my husband… so I lost half my insurance. I had two teenagers at home and one of them was on his way to 18, so we weren’t going to get any benefits for him. We are still a year and a half later fighting to get VA benefits so that my kids can pay for college … Learning how to rebuild, that has been difficult. A year and a half later I have a great job, I have great insurance, but it took rebuilding to get there,” an input session participant said.

The collaborative’s next steps will be to form work groups of local experts to brainstorm strategies and measures to improve the three priorities. A final version of the improvement plan will be available early next year.

Contact reporter Madeleine Moore: [email protected].

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Madeleine Moore is working as a reporter at Salem Reporter through the University of Oregon’s Charles Snowden internship program. She came to Salem after graduating from the University of Oregon in June 2024 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.