Phase 5: St. Louis County, MO Vignette

The St. Louis County Department of Health (SLCDOH) serves a large urban and suburban geographic area surrounding the city of St. Louis. In 1997, SLCDOH embarked on the "In- Partnership" process — an initiative designed to assist them in more accurately and effectively assessing and serving the communities in the area. A collaborative community health planning process with the Jennings community and an internal core functions based training process, which included ongoing collaborative activities with distinct communities in the county, were implemented. As part of these processes, SLCDOH developed two groups of strategies expressed as goals and objectives focusing on strengthening the organizational capacity of the health department and on improving community health status.

Organizational capacity goals included:

• Strengthen organizational capacity in key areas: the budgeting process, personnel resource management, organizational learning, and external communications.
• Enhance the public health leadership role in the community through centers of excellence, projecting the DOH mission in the community, and instituting the core functions.
• Create and sustain external partnerships needed to implement the core functions.

Community health goals included:

• Ensure a community and personally oriented quality health system by the following activities: redefine community health roles, assure comprehensive public health services, increase community involvement, base analysis and priority setting on assessment, define clear roles for DOH divisions, establish closer relationships with elected officials, and increase organizational quality management.
• Prevent illness, injury, disability, and premature death through small area needs assessment and priority setting to drive program planning and service integration.
• Protect the community through improved understanding of health and health threats using improved communications with the community, promoting the Centers of Excellence, evaluating program effectiveness, and targeting health education.
• Safeguard consumers from risks associated with products, services and other health hazards.

Many of the goal areas called for implementation plans to be established. Goals and actions were similar for some areas and the integration of strategies was promoted. The divisions are continuing to develop and periodically review strategies to support and attain these benchmarks. The goal statements were presented in a brief seven-page report, DOH Strategic Plan Goals and Objectives.

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