Desert View Hospital to host Community Health Needs Assessment
Officials at Desert View Hospital are seeking community input for Thursday’s Community Health Needs Assessment meeting from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the hospital.
The assessment, open to the public, includes health professionals, medical providers, and leaders from the business, education, social services and community service organizations.
Desert View CEO Susan Davila said the goal of the 90-minute meeting will help to determine what the community needs are for medical services in Pahrump and surrounding areas.
Additionally, officials will establish key health needs through comprehensive data collection and analysis, including a rollout of the community health needs survey.
“As a critical access hospital, the federal government says that we have to do this every three years,” she said. “It’s very informational and it is really important that our community comes and fills out the surveys, which will all be explained on Thursday evening.”
The meeting Davila said, will be facilitated by John Packham, PhD, the director of Health Policy Research, and Laima Etchegoyhen, from the Office of Statewide Initiatives for the University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine.
“Dr. John Packham has been in the state of Nevada for quite some time and I have worked with him quite a bit on different activities pertaining to rural areas,” she said. “John has a lot of expertise in this field and he has a lot of staff in different rural areas in Nevada, especially for Nye County.”
Thursday’s meeting will also include a preliminary discussion of the health care and public health services required to meet those needs in rural areas.
“We want to hear directly from our community, and this is an invaluable forum to share thoughts and ideas,” Davila noted. “I hope our community leaders and residents will be able to join us.”
Davila also said the hospital will follow up on what is gleaned during Thursday’s meeting.
“We will get this feedback and do another community meeting as soon as Dr. Packham gets everything done,” she said. “We will have a follow-up so we can present back to our community what the findings were.”
In order to gauge attendance numbers, Davila said she would prefer those planning to attend the meeting to RSVP their intentions.
“We would prefer to have attendees RSVP because we want to find out roughly how many people are going to come to the meeting. We want to make sure we have enough food and chairs.”
Desert View Hospital is at 360 S. Lola Lane between West Basin and Wilson Road.
Those interested in attending may RSVP to mandrell.ralston@uhsinc.com
Contact reporter Selwyn Harris at sharris@pvtimes.com. On Twitter: @pvtimes
