CEO Update: How public health and healthcare work together to help the community

CEO Update Community
• 13 August 2026

Michael Calhoun shares the latest happenings at CMH in his monthly CEO Updates. He is the CEO/executive director of CMH and the Citizens Memorial Health Care Foundation.

A healthy community depends on more than visits to the doctor’s office. It also takes strong public health partnerships, local services and a shared commitment to meeting people where they are.

Michelle Morris is the administrator at the Polk County Health Center in Bolivar. In this CEO Update, Michelle and I talk about public health and how we work together to help our community.

Continue reading the blog post or watch the video to learn more about:

• Defining public health
• Community Health Needs Assessment
• Community Health Improvement Plan
• Rural Health Transformation

Defining public health

Morris: The Polk County Health Center has actually been in the county since 1966. It was formed by a vote of the people, and then the community elected a board. There’s a five-member board of trustees that oversees the work of the health department, and we have about 27 staff members who conduct the programs and services that we provide. The role of the health center is really to look at the needs of the community, identify where there are gaps and then try to help the community by filling those gaps.

That can come in a variety of ways, depending on the programs that are needed. We currently provide many services, such as the WIC program, which is the Women, Infants and Children program. We have women’s health services for women who don’t have health insurance. We partner with CMH through the Breast and Cervical Cancer program to get mammograms for women who don’t have health insurance. That program is provided by the state and facilitated through our department.

Additionally, a big part of what we do is communicable disease and environmental health. When anyone in our county is diagnosed with a communicable disease, we have a responsibility to follow up, and we work with the hospital very closely on that.

Environmental health is another program that we provide. Environmental health services include restaurant inspections, daycare inspections and onsite sewage. It’s our department’s responsibility to make sure those things follow the guidelines and regulations set forth by the state of Missouri.

Community health needs assessment

Calhoun: One of the key ways you talked about serving the community was through our community health needs assessment that really is about defining the needs in the community. Share with us how that process comes together, how we form that health needs assessment and what it gives us.

Morris: In 2024, we started working on the current community health needs assessment that we have in place. That assessment was put together through a process of meeting with community partners to identify what questions we might ask the community to determine what the needs were. From there, we developed a survey for the community. We put that survey out to the community through a variety of modes and mediums. We collected that data to determine what the community thought the needs were. Then we took secondary data, which is considered data that the hospital collects through the Missouri Hospital Association and the Health Department collects through the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services. We compared those data sets and identified what our top community priority community health needs were based on that information.

Calhoun: Who sees that data? Who is at the table when we’re forming this assessment?

Morris: Partners included the hospital, Community Outreach Ministries, local city and county government, Ozarks Community Health Center and Burrell Behavioral Health. We met with all of those partners at the table to try to take that data and identify the top three areas that we were going to address.

3 biggest identified needs

Calhoun: What were some of the things we learned about the Bolivar community, specifically as we went through that process?

Morris: The top priority health area that was identified was mental health and behavioral health issues. Second was nutrition and physical activity. We have higher than normal rates of obesity within our community, so what can we do as a community to impact nutrition through nutrition and physical activity? The third priority area was actually access to health care. We have a great system within our community, but when we talk about access, it’s not just the location; it’s how do you get to the location. How are you going to access those points? Even though the facility might be there, how do we get the people in there?

Community health improvement plan

Calhoun: So as we identify those, the next question is how we address the concerns that we see. How do we make sure we’re making improvements in the health of our community?

Morris: With that same coalition of partners, we developed a community health improvement plan. Through that community health improvement plan, we have specific objectives and activities that will be conducted over the course of the next three years to try to have a positive impact on those measures. It’s really anything from our summer food program that we’re doing right now with kids, making sure that they have nutritious meals while school is not in session, to transportation, working with the hospital and New Growth Transit. How do we make sure that we have access for individuals who don’t have transportation?

There are very specific measures and outcomes that we are working on to try to address those health outcomes.

Rural Health Transformation

Calhoun: As we progress in 2026, we’re going to be hearing more about rural health transformation. The federal and the state governments have called upon rural communities to come together to transform rural health care. I’m really excited about that because I feel like that really hits at the heart of what CMH and the Polk County Health Center are trying to do every day.

The things we’ve learned from this assessment, coming together, being at the table together, having discussions about how we can fill care gaps, really do help us be successful in that new environment where we’re really called upon to transform health care.

Morris: I’ve had thoughts along the way that, in all honesty, I feel like that, with CMH and the work that you’ve been doing with ToRCH (Transformation of Rural Community Health) over the last three years, that really you’re better poised to actually have a greater impact than in some other parts of the state. And I’m excited about that.

Calhoun: Michelle, it’s always a pleasure to work with you and the health center. You’ve got a great team at the health center, and they do great work for the community. I really appreciate the opportunity to work with you.