Healthy Adams County will celebrate 30 years in the Adams County community this year. To begin our year of celebration I would like to review our history and our roots with you. (Thanks to Steve Niebler for providing the history)
Healthy Adams County actually has its roots in an organization created in the late 1950s called the Adams County Council of Community Services (ACCCS). In October, 1993 a group that included Dr. Leah Maitland, John Eline and Bill Taft from the Gettysburg Hospital and Steve Niebler from the Adams County Office for Aging, Inc. (ACOFA) met to discuss the need and possibility of conducting a community health needs assessment. In December 1993, Bill, John and Steve visited the York and Lancaster Hospitals to review what those communities had done to both conduct community health needs assessments and begin to develop community health partnerships which would better link the local hospitals and the local human service agencies together.
At about this same time, these same gentlemen and others including new hospital President Steve Renner and County Commissioner (and hospital Baard member) Tom Collins attended several workshops in Hershey sponsored by the Hospital Association of Pennsylvania and conducted by folks from Estes Park in Colorado. The training was built upon the theme of establishing better collaboration between the health care community and the human service agencies that operated in any community.
Beginning in 1994 several committees were formed and began to work on the Community Health Needs Assessment. The first major decision made was to use existing, local staff rather than an outside consultant to conduct the CHNA. It was felt that this would both save money and provide a more local flavor to the results. With significant assistance from Gettysburg College and the United Way, the survey was distributed in 1994 and into 1995.
Early 1996 saw the publication and distribution of the top 14 critical health and human service needs of the county and a top 12 list of recommendations that were needed to improve the health of the community. This year was considered the beginnings of our community health partnership. Task forces were formed to address many of the top needs which included Domestic Violence Prevention, Child Abuse Prevention, Teen Pregnancy Prevention, oral health, health access, tobacco prevention, breast cancer prevention, Latino affairs, health and fitness, aging, behavioral health and many, many others.
As years went on, more task forces were formed and ACCCS was eventfully merged with the Adams County Partnership for Community Health (ACPCH). This was followed a few years later by a name change to Healthy Adams County (HAC) in 2003.
My predecessor Bill Taft retired in late 2005 and I became the 2nd Executive Director of Healthy Adams County in April of 2006 after chairing the Domestic Violence Task Force for 8 years and serving on the HAC Board of Directors.
I am amazed that I will have been with HAC for 20 years this April. I am proud of the work that our task forces and committees have accomplished over the years and look forward to continuing to work with our amazing volunteers who seek to improve our quality of life in Adams County! Please visit our website at www.healthyadamscounty.org to learn more about our work.
Kathy Gaskin is the Executive Director of Healthy Adams County.