Got three minutes? Help MCHD help the community!

Oct. 2, 2025

By Mary Wade Burnside

In just three minutes’ time, you can let your voices be heard and make a contribution to health care in our region.
Interested? Then please take some time to fill out Monongalia County Health Department’s Community Needs Health Assessment (CHNA), which you can access by going to this link.
Residents of Monongalia, Preston and Marion counties are asked to consider filling out this survey.
“The CHNA is essentially a document that uses data collected to determine the health needs of the community, which is extremely important to us,” said Dr. Brian Huggins, MCHD health officer and medical director. “It helps inform our Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP) and the CHIP is how we are going to allocate resources to solve problems we’ve identified through the CHNA.”
A Community Health Needs Assessment isn’t new. It’s a survey conducted every three years by WVU Medicine and Mon Health Medical Center in order to gather useful data to make changes and address as many people’s needs as possible. Typically, MCHD partners with both hospital systems in the CHNA.
For MCHD’s 2025 CHNA, however, the health department needed to gather additional data specific to public health. So while we will also be participating with the hospitals, we are also gathering some info on our own.
The survey is purposely short to help ensure that as many people as possible will take it and complete all the questions
“We realize that people’s time is important,” Dr. Huggins said. “If we are going to be able to get people’s opinions, we really wanted to make sure people weren’t spending a lot of time doing it. So it’s a three-minute survey with powerful questions.”
At the end, he noted, there is space so that individuals are free to bring up any topics that they feel weren’t addressed.
The survey is available on Monongalia County Health Department’s website (monchd.org) and social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn). We’re placing flyers with a QR code up around town and WVU School of Public Health students also will approach individuals in public settings to ask them to take the survey. The students will be wearing IDs, Dr. Huggins noted.
“They should clearly be identified that they are from WVU,” he added.
We owe a big thanks to WVU for placing an ad, also with a QR code, on the Jumbotron at the football team’s home games.
We’ll also have tables at the First Friday for the Arts/Arts Walk events as well as at the Morgantown Farmers Market, Dr. Huggins said.
The CHNA “will directly influence the decisions we make with the kinds of outreach that we give in the community and the kind of programming we provide, everything from classes to services to products that we produce.”
This makes it essential to get responses from as many different people as possible.
“Every voice is important,” Dr. Huggins said. “Even if you don’t have concerns, that’s important for us to know. We really need to hear from all corners of the county and everything in between. We really want to be able to get a good sample. Ideally, we’d like to be able to talk to everyone but obviously, that’s not possible.”
The CHNA is also a requirement for Monongalia County Health Department as it pursues accreditation through the Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB), Dr. Huggins said.
For accreditation, it needs to be redone every five years, but MCHD does its survey every three years to sync up with the hospitals. The CHNA should be completed by the end of the year, and the CHIP will be completed in the spring of 2026 in order to meet the deadline for MCHD’s submission of measurements in 10 domains.
When it comes time to implement elements compiled in the CHIP, MCHD will collaborate with partners that can include the Morgantown City Council, the Monongalia County Commission, the WVU School of Health and health-related non-profits and businesses.
Some of the projects probably would require funding, which is one reason working with partners is helpful.
So what kinds of results could the community expect? It can run the gamut from classes offered by MCHD to helping to establish a coalition to work on transportation and sidewalks, two issues that have been flagged in previous surveys.
“This survey helps guide us on what are the priorities and where we should be putting our time,” Dr. Huggins said. “We’ll put our resources into things the community is interested in having us perform.”

Mary Wade Burnside is the public information officer at Monongalia County Health Department.