Impact Avenues Looks To Identify Gaps In Public Health Information

By Dean Wright, The Bristol Press

March 1, 2022

Impact Avenues, the Bristol Diversity Council’s initiative to explore the possibility of declaring racism a public health crisis, will be working with university students to identify gaps in public health information as part of a 2022 community health assessment.

Alice Ferguson, one of the forefront representatives of the effort, said the declaration is not “set in stone” but the council is exploring what available data it can surrounding the issue.

“We’ve some legwork on the Diversity Council but we understand that it’s something that it, number one, can’t be taken lightly and, number two, has to be done with data first and second some education and communicating with the community,” Ferguson said.

She said the council was a group that “wants to hear, then react” to those it serves. She noted the initiative was also looking past a declaration as “health applies to everyone.”

Ferguson said she had recently met with Health Equity Solutions, a nonprofit organization based in Hartford which seeks to push forward better health equity in the state in both advocacy and policy.

She said the organization would make itself available to the council for consultation and that it recommended the council conduct community forums to express how it feels about racism as a public health issue.

She also met with Bristol Health to discuss the 2019 Bristol Health Community Needs Assessment Report. She said another person at the meeting had been part of the Bristol 2021 Equity Profile.

“These are all a part of data reports we’ve been looking at as preliminary reviews as part of our background work in looking at declaring racism a public health crisis in Bristol,” Ferguson said.

She said she thought she was going to the meeting to ask for updated data but learned a group of University of New Haven students had been commissioned to create an updated 2022 Community Health Needs Assessment study.

“They asked me if I would be a part of working with the students,” Ferguson said. “It was a bonus for me.”

She said she felt honored to be given the opportunity to help.

“The Diversity Council will actually be a part of setting some trends and helping these students,” Ferguson said.

In addition, she said Impact Avenues was looking into a Connecticut ALICE Report to look at income challenges facing area residents, community forums and the potential for creating focus groups for study.

“All of this is going to take time and planning and members,” she said of the council, urging community members to join the effort, and not just those with the Diversity Council.

Diversity Council Chair Alicia Washington noted that “gaps found in the community health assessment were pretty big.” She said having a group dedicated to updating data for 2022 was a “big deal.”

“A lot of times these data reports, they’re used for multiple things, and if the data isn’t correct or there’s a lot of gaps then we’ve identified something that can be fixed and that information can be used in the right way because it’s accurate information,” Washington said.