Investing in the Community? Listen to the Community First.
Over the last 15 years, Nationwide Children’s Hospital has created a nationally prominent community investment initiative called Healthy Neighborhoods Healthy Families. It’s often held up as a model for other hospitals wishing to improve the wellbeing of neighborhoods and their residents.
But it has not always been this way, as Nick Jones, director of the initiative, writes in a column for the American Hospital Association’s Center for Health Innovation. The communities near the hospital’s main campus once criticized Nationwide Children’s for not listening closely enough to the needs of their people.
So the hospital has built a number of strategies to ensure that its neighborhood investment work is guided by the neighborhoods themselves.
“(W)e have come to realize in the nearly 15 years of our Healthy Neighborhoods Healthy Families community investment initiative — especially as we have expanded in the last two years — that we cannot fully care for a community until we earn their trust.”
