The Creating a Healthier Marblehead Health and Wellness Survey initiative is winding down, and the survey team is working hard to get as many additional responses submitted as possible before it ends. Our survey will empower the Board Of Health and many other organizations to provide targeted services and funding to specific needs so your participation is invaluable.
While we are working at that, we are very mindful of how far we have come and how many great people have helped enormously along the way.
Historically, Marblehead has, on paper, drastically underinvested in its traditional public health services. The state recommendation for town public health expenditures is $39.98/resident, suggesting an appropriate budget of $739,600 for Marblehead. The actual budget is $326,041, which is equal to less than half of the recommended amount. That low support figure can be explained in part by the fact that the Board of Health oversees the Transfer Station, which provides an indirect but very important public health service, as the town came to realize during the recent curbside trash and recycling pickup strike.
The Board of Health is scheduled to expand from three to five elected members next year. As part of its planning for expansion, the Board has become interested in strengthening the public health services it provides. The most logical way to determine what services the town residents might want and need was to ask them. Thus, the idea for a survey was approved. We proposed the idea for upgrading public health to a number of community-based organizations. Virtually everyone endorsed the concept and several actually came though with funding support. The Rotary Club of Marblehead, The Marblehead Female Humane Society, The Mariner, and the Rotary Club of Marblehead Harbor all generously donated to allow CAHM effort to proceed without a penny of town taxpayer funding. We are very grateful for that support.
We eventually partnered with a team from UMass Boston that has been assessing health and wellness in Massachusetts municipalities in for many years. They have completed 80 studies including our neighbors in Salem and Swampscott. Different groups from Marblehead have approached them about doing a similar study here. So once the Board began thinking about expanding services, a partnership with UMass Boston seemed logical and on May 20, the Board of Health signed the contract for the CAHM initiative.
Once the contract was signed, we began to work with Dr Caitlin Coyle’s team at UMass to develop the survey. Caitlin submitted her regular set of tried-and-true questions, and I believe she was surprised at how much we wanted to make the questions totally Marblehead specific. A small group team of Marblehead residents met with her team for several hours going over every question and the nuances they contained. Working collegially and collectively, the team took the original 50 questions down to the final 42 and customized them for Marblehead residents.
Speaking of Marblehead residents, a total of 1,661 of them completed the survey by Oct. 31. Table One shows the breakdown of town population by age decile and the responses form each age range. The most obvious result is that the younger age groups are underrepresented. That is not unexpected. We are the first municipality of the 80 that UMass Boston has worked with that submitted surveys to the 18 year and older group. That group has lived most of their lives the internet and cell phones and is known to be a challenge to survey developers. But we are working on blanketing the community with ads, posters, table cards, and postcards to increase all responses especially from the younger groups. I know I speak for the Board of Health in expressing great gratitude to all of the individuals who have helped shape the survey or have completed it as invited. It is another example of how Marblehead believes in volunteer-orientated self-governance.
The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author’s alone. They do not necessary reflect the opinion of the Board of Health which he chairs.
Tom Massaro is a Marblehead resident and Chair of the Board of Health.
