Cascade Medical | 2020 Report to Our Community

2 2020 Report to Our Community Welcome to the first edition of our annual report. Within these pages you’ll learn more about your community medical center and where we’ll be focused in the future. As a Public Hospital District, Cascade Medical has the distinct privilege of being owned by you, our community. I’m delighted to share our work, and I welcome your feedback. In 2019, we conducted a Community Health Needs Assessment to help us better understand the needs of those we serve and chart our path forward. This work helped us identify three broad areas of community need: Child and family wellness. Local families face a wide range of challenges, everything from substance abuse to behavioral health, a lack of childcare options, and barriers to health care due to language, location or lack of insurance. Aging in place. By 2024, nearly one third of our hospital district residents are expected to be age 65 or older. Our research showed two needs associated with that growth—seniors living in isolation and barriers to healthy activity, particularly in winter. We also know that aging populations require more health care services to support a quality life within their home community. Equity for neighbors in poverty and the working poor. Nearly half of our service area residents live in poverty or are part of the working poor. These community members are particularly affected by the lack of affordable housing, food insecurity and the lack of robust public transportation. Over the next three years, we will explore ways to meet these community needs, as well as sustain our current services. Those plans include: ■    ■ Delivering health care to outlying areas of our hospital district. ■    ■ Developing programs to better serve our population, including pediatric occupational and speech therapy and a stroke care program. ■    ■ Collaborating with partner agencies to address community needs. ■    ■ Developing more bilingual services. ■    ■ Reaching out with both our insurance navigator service, which helps residents enroll in insurance plans, and our Community Financial Support Program, which provides free and sliding-scale care. We are fortunate to take on this work with strong support and collaboration from you and the excellent team at Cascade Medical. We are blessed to be entrusted with your care. Diane Blake, CEO