Our Story
The Western Idaho Community Health Collaborative (WICHC) was established in 2019 to collaborate and align efforts to improve our health system and build a healthier western Idaho.
As a community of stakeholders, we aim to transform the health of our communities by collaborating, prioritizing, and collectively supporting the community health needs and healthcare transformation efforts that will have the greatest impact on improving health outcomes and lowering the costs of healthcare.
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By bringing together our most valuable community institutions – hospitals, public health, schools, public safety agencies, parks, and local businesses – along with local residents, we can create a new vision for our health system. Our vision is for a health system that is capable of fundamentally changing health outcomes by aligning interventions for maximum impact, promoting prevention, and organizing resources to focus on the most effective strategies. Through this effort, we can move closer to making health equity among all community members a reality in our ten-county region that includes Ada, Adams, Boise, Canyon, Elmore, Gem, Owyhee, Payette, Valley, and Washington Counties.
To realize this vision, WICHC is utilizing the model known as the Collective Impact Model. Collective impact brings people and agencies together in a structured way, to achieve greater impact. It starts with a common agenda, establishing shared measures, working together on reinforcing activities, with consistent communication, and a strong backbone organization. This model requires us to no longer work in isolation from one another and own the shared responsibility of transforming community health. We cannot continue to place most of the responsibility on clinicians to keep us well. Building healthy communities is possible when different sectors work toward a common cause, creating a culture change for a healthier Idaho. However, these sectors, and the various services and programs they provide, often work in isolation of one another—operating as solo efforts, who play their own songs. WICHC seeks to transform these solo players into a highly functioning orchestra.
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WICHC is grounded in the Collective Impact Model, an approach centered on cross-sector collaboration working towards lasting and impactful change. The backbone organizations are Central and Southwest District Health.
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WICHC sets the table that enables organizations and people across multiple sectors to work together across urban, rural, and frontier communities, creating solutions. These solutions are designed to connect and reinforce each other for greater impact than any single program or intervention could achieve alone.
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WICHC emphasizes and operates to create participation and inclusion of everyday residents in all aspects of WICHC, so they are actively shaping the region, the business model for health and ultimately, determining the health of their communities. WICHC elevates community voice to become part of systemic changes in our healthcare, public health, social service sectors.
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Health happens outside a doctor’s office and is created and preserved in communities. The social influencers of health can either contribute to ill health or support good health. WICHC is steadfast in addressing these upstream issues to prevent the chronic diseases, injury, and poor quality of life.