Organized by Kitsap Public Health District, the community health priorities process presents an opportunity for partners to come together for learning, collaborating and community action.  

We appreciate your participation in our January and February convenings. Your great conversations and input position us for next steps. Currently, we are hard at work preparing for the next phase of this process. We are excited to gather again and with your participation, launch priority implementation. Please stay tuned for more details about summer activities!  

During the February 8th convening, community partners worked hard to develop broad goal statements for each community health priority issue:  

• Healthcare Access: Bridge strengths and reduce barriers in our healthcare system while fostering comprehensive solutions to create a thriving equitable healthcare future. 
  
  
• Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder: Expand accessible, equitable and responsive services and supports to prevent, intervene, and treat mental/behavioral health and substance use disorders that meet people where they are. 
  
  
• Housing and Homelessness Response: Increase safe and sustainable housing options across the continuum and create systems that provide pathways out of homelessness and into stable housing. 

Our community health priorities are aligned, interconnected and intersectional to the many, many priorities in our community. We are a strong, vibrant web of partners addressing many things in many ways. Through KCHP, we will bolster community action and work to advance health equity over the next 5 years and beyond.  

KCHP provides a pathway for assessing our community, identifying health priorities and mobilizing inclusive county wide action, leveraging community partners strengths and assets to coordinate, co-implement and track progress over the next 5 years. Actions could include improvement/expansion of existing strategies, new evidence-based strategies, new interventions all together, or something else!  

An essential focus of the Kitsap Community Health Priorities process is achieving health equity. One tool we will leverage to guide us is MAPP 2.0: Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships, a community health improvement process framework. We look forward to sharing this process and learning with you all.  

Use the Kitsap Community Health Priorities webpage as a resource to access data, read progress updates and see background on past KCHP assessments.