Hospital participation in community partnerships to improve health

The core business of hospitals now requires, for both competitiveness and quality improvement reasons, that hospitals move beyond their physical and conceptual walls to form community partnerships. THE HOSPITAL'S ROLE AS A PARTNER IN COMMUNITY-BASED HEALTH IMPROVEMENT SYSTEMS: Hospitals, as organizations that are significant health care, social, and economic institutions in their communities, should play a leading role in mobilizing resources for such community-level health improvement efforts.

Three examples of extending hospital efforts into the community demonstrate that improvement of a problem involving hospital care can derive from a collaborative, community-based activity. In Boston, infection control--once a standard, strictly in-house procedure--has been forced by altered patterns of hospital use to become a largely community-based process. In Chicago, a variety of health care providers and community representatives have worked effectively to reduce mortality and morbidity in a single disease (asthma) model. In Akron, Ohio, Lifelink program hospitals, working together with community agencies and groups in a door-to-door neighborhood program, improved the effectiveness of prenatal care and the quality of birth outcomes.

Efforts to work with community groups to improve health status should not be simply an optional do-good endeavor, as they have often been in the past, but rather an essential part of quality improvement and good business practice. Marketplace incentives will increasingly reward hospitals that are able to form successful community partnerships.