Closing The Triangle

Today I drove to Wellsboro, PA.  Wellsboro is in Tioga County, just below the NY border.  The meeting was to share the experiences of the Tioga Partnership For Health with representatives from Altoona, PA.  The folks in Tioga have taken an inclusive, collaborative approach to addressing health and wellness in their community.  The three original leaders of the partnership were the hospital system, the county social service leadership and the President of Mansfield University.  Over the past 12 years, they have developed trust by letting people work on the things that interested them.  Some people worked on smoking in pregnancy, others worked on obesity or school menu choices.  Their community health center participated in three Health Disparities Collaborative projects through the Federal Bureau of Primary Health Care.  They have grant funded staff as infrastructure, providing support to their volunteer work groups and handling day-day tasks.  Remarkably, they have decreased their hospital admissions rate in each of the last three years.

Each of the Tioga representatives reinforced the idea of helping people get past their own perceived limitations of what the partnership could accomplish.  When people said something couldn't be done, they asked "If it could be done, what would it look like?"  This helped people break out of learned helplessness.  They also used phrases like non-linearity, letting people with similar interests volunteer to work together and the trusting relationships formed within the work groups allowed the groups to take chances. 

The Altoona representatives noted that in the past, they had two competing hospitals that each started wellness programs, but rather than work together, they ended up being short-lived, ineffectual tools for driving market share.  Now their hospitals are in one system, so they may have better chances of hospital community collaboration. 


At the end of our meeting today, the Tioga folks agreed to drive to Altoona and share their stories with Altoona community leaders.  Then we get to see what emerges!