Chaffee County, CO- Chaffee County Public Health (CCPH) is excited to announce the launch of its 2026 Community
Health Assessment (CHA), which will drive a five-year Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP) focusing on our
county’s most pressing health and wellness needs. Over the course of the next several months, CCPH will be
collecting data from a wide variety of sources, including stakeholder events with community leaders, key informant
interviews with local subject-matter experts, and a community-wide survey that will go live for public participation in
late Spring through the Summer. The CHA is an opportunity to gather information so that we can strategically
identify our top local health concerns, as well as our assets, and to inform goals, objectives, strategies, and outcomes
in the multi-year CHIP. In the 2021 CHA, behavioral health, access to care, and environmental health were identified
as the county’s top health priorities, and most of the CHIP’s activities have already been completed ahead of
schedule.
“Chaffee County should be proud of the milestones we have reached regarding the efforts in the current
improvement plan, and we hope that the impact and progress we have made in a wide variety of areas will continue
into our updated multi-year plan. While we have made significant strides in the health and wellness landscape in
Chaffee County, there is still so much work to do to protect and promote health. We at CCPH hope that everyone has
a chance to participate in the assessment process, because we all have unique needs and expectations on what a
robust health system looks like and ideas on how to make it even better than it is today!” said Andrea Carlstrom,
CCPH Director.
CCPH’s final CHA/CHIP document should be completed by November 2026 and will go before the Chaffee County
Board of County Commissioners acting as the Board of Health for review and authorization in December 2026. It will
then be submitted to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. CCPH reports on progress made
on the CHIP on a regular basis, and members of the public as well as community partners are always welcome to
inquire about its status. While there are many more areas that CCPH and its partners are working on beyond those
that are in the CHIP, this guiding document helps prioritize a few that require focused and specific attention and
resources as well as coordination and collaboration with various community stakeholders. Funding could become
available from health foundations that have the same scope as the priorities chosen.